2016 elections: building for peak performance

2016 Elections: Building for Peak Performance

Erik Bursch, VP - Platform as a Service (PaaS), Gannett Franklin Hanson, Sr. Manager - PaaS, Gannett Al Kemner, Principal Engineer - PaaS, Gannett

2016 Elections: Building for Peak Performance

Erik BurschVP - Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Franklin HansonSr. Manager -

PaaS

Al KemnerPrincipal Engineer

- PaaS

Rarity of Planned Events

Rarity of Planned Events

USA TODAY NETWORK Election Products

USA TODAY NETWORK Reach

300+ sites and 225M unique users reached via stories about our Elections Coverage

210M Impressions USATODAY NETWORK On Air Content mentions

The cost of SLOW

• 40% of readers will leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. • That costs Gannett readership, market share and ad revenue. • We need to optimize each application, its infrastructure.

What are our PAIN points during Load Testing?

• In a complicated system full stack load testing requires full stack visibility.

• Pains manifest themselves in a variety of areas and we instrument each layer of our ecosystem

Mapping Critical Dependencies

Building a Feedback

Loop

Develop

Tune

Monitor

Custom instrumentation for transactions in

Node.js and Golang

October 17, 2016

• Reduce the # and MTTR of on call • React quickly and make data driven decisions• Be Proactive about performance issues• Increase Release Velocity

“The USATODAY NETWORK continues to grow as a nationwide news and information brand, especially during

news events such as the national elections. It is critical that we have clear and broad visibility into our content publishing

platforms and the performance of their underlying infrastructure. Better tooling and application monitoring has

allowed us to achieve our goals and deliver a robust and engaging experience to our users.”

-Jamshid Khazenie, CTO USATODAY NETWORK

Success!

Success!

Editorial Response

“Key to any election night coverage plan is an unbeatable results presentation, and we set a high bar for our results.

They had to be fast – preferably faster than the competition -- they had to work across platforms, they had to easily convey what was happening at any point during the night, and they

had to work for the entire USA TODAY Network. Looking back on election night, I feel we met each of these goals.”

-Joanne Lipman, CCO USATODAY NETWORK

Interested in our team? ebursch@gannett.com fhanson@gannett.com akemner@gannett.com

Q&A