NWT Media decided to take control of its digital media distribution platform through a cloud-native solution based on the AWS (Amazon Web Services). Early in the process, NWT Media realised they need a Managed Services partner to help keep their services running 24/7.
NWT Media is one of Sweden's leading media groups, delivering local news through its 17 newspaper brands sites, apps, and print products. NWT Media also provides B2B services like media advisory and strategy, production of ads, movies, and campaigns. NWT Media Bredband is the third business unit, providing broadband internet connectivity mainly to NWT Media’s subscribers.
To ensure business continuity NWT Media decided to take control of its digital media distribution platform through a homegrown, cloud-native solution based on the AWS platform. NWT Media contacted Knowit and after only four months the first version of the media platform was onboarded and ready to be operated by Knowit.
The media platform includes support for core functionalities such as publication of news articles, integration of ads and subscription management. The solution was designed with the latest AWS technologies, such as Lambda, RDS and autoscaling to seamlessly support breaking news peak demands and a minimum of 25 million pageviews per month.
NWT Media realised early in the process that to ensure that their digital services are available for customers when they need them, they require a long-term partner to help keep their services running 24/7. In addition, the partner should be able to provide cloud advisory related to application architecture, infrastructure design and security and who can advise regarding new functionality in the rapidly growing AWS platform.
Furthermore, the partner needs to work closely with NWT Media’s development team, jointly forming an efficient way of working together as one DevOps team. Based on these criteria, Knowit was selected as NWT Media’s long-term AWS partner.
The onboarding process was lean and smooth as part of the ongoing platform development, and only after four months Knowit started providing the 24/7 managed services for NWT Media. Knowit supported NWT Media in parallel with them gradually going live with the new media platform.
We found Knowit’s Managed Services very transparent and well-structured. We also appreciate their open mindset in solving our demands and requests. As Managed Services provider, Knowit is a broad and competent partner with expert skills that support and work well together with our development team efficiently and seamlessly.
Daniel Lundström, CTO and Head of Development at NWT Media AB
The collaboration between NWT Media and Knowit started by jointly doing an AWS Well-Architected Review. It gave Knowit a good insight of the development process of the new media platform and a solid foundation for future successful collaboration. NWT Media’s outcome was a design review according to the AWS best practices and an opportunity to raise fundings. The Well-Architected Review also offered a perfect chance for NWT Media to evaluate Knowit as a cloud partner.
In parallel with the Well-Architected Review, the contract and onboarding process progressed smoothly and the onboarding to Knowit’s Managed Operations Center (MOC) in Tampere, Finland was finalised in only two months' time.
In addition to implementing Knowit standard governance model with monthly meetings to handle SLA-targets, cost control and events from monitoring system, a streamlined working approach was implemented for the NWT Media and Knowit teams. This approach, based on Slack, allows the teams to collaborate seamlessly as one DevOps team. By using this method, knowledge sharing, planning, and support requests can flow smoothly between the teams, eliminating the need for a cumbersome ticketing system.
Lately the collaboration has been expanded to cover also managed services regarding NWT media’s data analytics system.
Contribution to SDG 9: The cloud-native media platform enables measuring and analysing the sustainability impact of the solution and identifying opportunities to minimise its environmental impact. Managed services allow NWT Media to continuously optimise the cloud and energy usage and GHG emissions to validate the sustainability effects the cloud solution promotes.
