Condé Nast Digital Germany GmbH was founded in the year 2000 as an affiliated company of Condé Nast Publications, and it designs, edits and promotes the online presence of VOGUE.DE, GQ.de, GLAMOUR.DE, myself.de and STYLE.DE.
When customer visit the German-language sites for Glamour, GQ, and Vogue, readers find more than just the latest articles. Condé Nast Digital Germany provides them with archived content, communities, enhanced shopping, special microsites, and more.
Lower Costs and More Control
When Teske became CTO of Condé Nast Digital Germany, the organization outsourced virtually all of its IT operations. The infrastructure that stored and served magazine content was hosted by a traditional website hosting company. An agency handled website development and managed content. Teske saw two pressing disadvantages with this approach: high costs and lack of control.
The problem really became clear when the German edition of Vogue published an interview with a top star. Teske explains what happened: "The editors gave the article a very clever English-language title, and people all over the world wanted to read it. We had a huge surge in traffic for a few days, and our hosting provider couldn't add capacity quickly enough. The leased servers we added were expensive too. We had to pay a one-month minimum fee for a server we needed for just a few days."
Teske decided that Condé Nast Digital Germany needed to take control of its infrastructure and development processes - while lowering costs. He didn't want to incur the capital expense of actually buying new servers and hiring people to manage them, and he didn't want to reengineer the way Condé Nast Digital Germany managed and stored its content. Instead, he looked to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as a possible solution.
With the right IaaS provider, decision makers at Condé Nast Digital Germany hoped to gain an infrastructure that could run its content management system (CMS) efficiently, keep customer data secure, and provide flexible capacity management. Condé Nast Digital Germany evaluated several leading IaaS providers for their ability to deliver on all three key needs. Each offered capacity management that Condé Nast Digital Germany believed would be acceptably flexible, but the ease of use with GoGrid stood out.
Security was the biggest question mark. Many IaaS providers use entirely virtualized systems that store data on machines used by other customers. This setup didn't meet Condé Nast Digital Germany's high standards for data security. GoGrid offered a hybrid cloud architecture that did. In a hybrid architecture, cloud servers provide the cost and efficiency advantages of virtualized hardware, but dedicated machines store data and run database functions, enabling the use of security best practices. The dedicated machines could also natively run the MySQL database required by Condé Nast Digital Germany's CMS.
"GoGrid was not just best choice for us - it was the only real choice," says Teske. "None of the other major cloud providers or smaller local providers could give us everything we needed. In the end, the main issue was security. Germany has very tough data security laws, and GoGrid offered an architecture that let us easily employ security best practices. Our CMS was better suited to a hybrid environment, too."
Condé Nast Digital Germany got started by moving Glamour to GoGrid. The solution worked so well that the company quickly began the process of bringing GQ and Vogue over to GoGrid. Today, all three of the company's most popular titles run on GoGrid, and the company plans to move Myself to GoGrid in the near future. Five cloud servers run behind one dedicated load balancer. Two dedicated machines - one master and one slave - run the company's MySQL content database. Additional cloud servers power the company's community message boards, and dedicated machines run the database for the boards. Another load balancer spreads traffic across the servers. For testing and staging, the company uses two cloud servers along with a dedicated CMS and database server.
With traditional hosting, Condé Nast Digital Germany's costs were skyrocketing as it scaled its infrastructure to meet bursts in demand. Now, the IT team at Condé Nast Digital Germany simply reviews the magazine's editorial calendars in advance, and scales its GoGrid capacity as needed.
"Our hosted infrastructure was expensive, and as our online readership grew, it was getting more expensive all the time," says Teske. "We had to buy or lease enough server capacity to handle bursts in traffic. At a minimum, the leases were for a month, and it took time to add them to our infrastructure. With GoGrid, I can add server capacity in about 20 minutes, use it for a few days, and turn it off. So we're not locked into paying for a whole month of service we only need for a day or two."
Since turning to GoGrid, Condé Nast Digital Germany has retired more than a dozen machines in an external data center. The total cost of ownership (TCO) of the new solution is much lower and the IT team at Condé Nast Digital Germany doesn't miss the hassle associated with its hosted solution. "We don't have to take time to set up new machines or complete full stress testing," explains Teske. "The GoGrid interface makes it easy to manage our infrastructure. With the time we save, we're able to focus on new initiatives, such as delivering content to mobile devices."
Summing up the benefits of moving to GoGrid, Teske adds, "You might ask, 'Why move to the cloud? I'll have to reengineer everything just to save a little money.' With GoGrid, we really didn't have to reengineer our sites, and we're saving quite a lot of money. It's almost like being able to instantly acquire the ideal in-house infrastructure for our needs without having to buy or manage any machines. The performance is actually better than traditional hosting because we've gone from 99.8 percent uptime to 99.9 percent uptime."
