Orange deploys Amazon Web Services for digital service management
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Orange deploys Amazon Web Services for digital service management

Orange Digital, the digital services arm of mobile operator EE has moved to Amazon Web Services’ cloud to support spikes in traffic and capacity.

Orange estimates the move will reduce costs by approximately £2 million over a three year period, as it moves away from its previous infrastructure that “was expensive to run and time consuming to maintain, according to the company.

Traffic on the Orange and mobile home pages is climbing to almost 4 billion requests monthly, and according to the company, it has taken the step to move away from its limited fixed infrastructure. Orange hosts and develops web services that has highly variable traffic patterns which is likely to spike, meaning it requires short term capacity that can quickly be tested and deployed for the duration of an event.

“Our infrastructure was expensive to run and time consuming to maintain,” said Neil Jennings, lead enterprise architect at Orange. “Our traffic profile is variable in nature, which resulted in an oversize infrastructure 90% of the time. In addition, we had many EE micro sites and applications that needed rapid and temporary hosting. To scale up a physical infrastructure would present a massive upfront cost and a long time to market for deployment. So we sought alternative solutions.”

Orange Digital will use the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud for hosting servers in various roles, and will also use Amazon Simple Storage Service for static content hosting.

Jennings added, aside from cost, it had partnered with Amazon Web Services because it has the capabilities to scale up and down quickly.

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