TIA Keynote 2013: Jinesh Varia, Technology Evangelist, AWS and Bryson Koehler, Executive Vice President and CIO, The Weather Company discuss how different enterprises use AWS today. They discuss 4 strategies and real customer stories that represent trends in how large-scale enterprises adopt cloud computing. For the first time, The Weather Company, discusses on stage their strategy and use of AWS. Video available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=crIxor6FqCg

1. How Enterprises Like The Weather
Company Leverage the AWS Cloud
Jinesh Varia
Technology Evangelist, AWS
@jinman
Bryson Koehler
EVP, CIO, The Weather Company
@brysonkoehler
1

2. 7 Years Young
Amazon S3 launched: March 14th 2006

3. Cloud

4. Broad & Deep Services to Support Virtually Any Cloud Workload
Compute
Amazon EC2
Amazon EMR
Amazon ELB
Storage &
CDN
Networking
Amazon Route 53
Amazon VPC
AWS Direct Connect
AWS Partner Network
Amazon S3
Amazon Glacier
Amazon EBS
AWS Import/Exp
AWS Premium Support
Database
Amazon RDS
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon Elasticache
Amazon RedShift
AWS Professional
Services
App Services
Management
CloudSearch
Amazon SWF
Amazon SQS
Amazon SNS
Amazon SES
Amazon Elastic
Transcoder
AWS IAM
Amazon CloudWatch
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Cloudformation
AWS Data Pipeline
AWS OpsWorks
AWS CloudHSM
AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Marketplace
AWS Training &
Certification

5. Trusted by Enterprises Around the World

6. Used by Government Agencies & Educational Institutions Worldwide

7. • $5.2B retail business
Every day, AWS adds enough
• 7,800 employees
server capacity to power that
• A whole lot of servers
whole $5B enterprise

8. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
(August 19, 2013)
“AWS is the overwhelming market share
leader, with more than five times the
compute capacity in use than the
aggregate total of the other fourteen
providers in this Magic Quadrant.”
Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service,” Lydia Leong, Douglas Toombs, Bob Gill, Gregor Petri, Tiny Haynes, August 19, 2013. This
Magic Quadrant graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research note and should be evaluated in the context of the entire report.. The
Gartner report is available upon request from Steven Armstrong (asteven@amazon.com). Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in
its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of
the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with
respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

9. Bryson Koehler
EVP and CIO
9

10. B2B2C
DIRECT
CONSUMER
ONLINE & APPS
B2B
TV
GOV’T
PRODUCTS
WHERE THE WORLD GETS ITS WEATHER
61.6M
#1 MOST DISTRIBUTED
Cable Network*
*Nielsen, October 2012.
Unduplicated Monthly Uniques
(weather.com + wunderground)*
72% visit 2x or more Daily**
*comScore, Oct 2012 **Omniture, July 2012
100M+ App Downloads*
#2 All Time Most Downloaded iPad App**
47.2M Unduplicated Monthly Uniques***
*Various app stores, TWC only,
**App Store Rewind, 2011
***Omniture Site Catalyst, August 2012. TWC Mobile &
wunderground
10

11. Did You Know? TWC Weather Services for Businesses
World’s Leading Weather Media Company
 - Power 500+ broadcast channels world-wide
World’s Leading Aviation Weather Service
 - Support 50,000+ flights daily with embedded
forecasters, systems and tools
 - 85% of major US airlines. 30% of Top 100 global.
World’s Leading Energy Forecaster
 - Over 300 power trading clients worldwide
 - Hourly, daily, and seasonal trading
Fastest Growing Insurance Weather Service
 - 7 of the top 10 P&C insurance customers
 - Connecting Marketing, Underwriting, & Claims
with systems & tools
11

12. Weather is Changing
Warming winters in US
•
•
•
•
2012 was the hottest in recorded history for the
US
Last time January was colder than normal was
1983
In July 2012 61% of the country was in drought
conditions
9.2MM acres charred in 2012; 3rd highest in 13
years
Source: Time.com; Climate Central

13. Weather changes…
So must IT
Huge projects required to support these
business needs
In the next 12 months TWC will:
• Increase data points by 1,400%
• Increase data velocity by 300%
• Increase number of deployments by
2,000%
• Increase number of TV feeds from 1
to 7
• Increase the amount of video
content by 100%
• Increase the amount of social
content by 500%
... Cloud-Ready
• Consolidate 13 Data Centers
to 4
• 75% of workloads to IaaS
Cloud
• Move to agile development
teams
• New TV Transmission
System (retire 2, build 1)
• 575 APIs and 20 Data
platforms to 1 platform
• 2500+ new localization
servers
• New HR, Email, Finance,
Inventory, Expense, etc.

14. Enterprise Strategies
For the Cloud
14

15. Strategy
Build All New Apps
and Services in the
Cloud
15

16. Strategy 1: Build New Apps in the Cloud
Faster to build
Social
Apps
Mobile
Streaming
Consumer
Apps
Easier to manage
Less expensive to run
Distributed architectures
for high availability
Product
Websites
Global
Web Sites
Marketing
Campaigns

17. All of TWC’s new applications are being purposebuilt to run exclusively in the cloud
MAX 3D Radar
PilotBrief
New Weather.com
and Other Websites
New Weather
Analytics Systems
New Aviation/Energy
Forecasting Apps
New Data Ingest &
Publishing Apps
Weather Data API
Mobile Apps
17

18. Speed and Agility: Rapidly developing, testing, deploying
in the Cloud
From 1 highly
constrained team
1 release a month
Core Development
Team
Extra Development
Resources
8-10 decoupled
Scrum teams
4 releases a day
Contractor Team
Remote Team

19. Strategy 1: Nasdaq used AWS to Build a New Line of Business

20. Strategy
Augment On-Premises
IT Resources with Cloud
Capacity
20

21. Customer
Corporate
Data Center
Availability Zone A
Customer
Gateway
Private
Dedicated 10G
DirectConnect
VPN
Gateway
NAT
Private
Subnet
Router
Customer
Branch Offices
Internet
Public
Subnet
Internet
Gateway
Amazon VPC
Availability Zone B
The Cloud-Ready Enterprise IT Network
Architecture
Object
Store
S3
NoSQL DB
Service
Email
Service
Queue
Service
DynamoDB
SES
SQS
AWS Region

22. Strategy #2
Augment On-Premises
IT Resources with
Cloud Capacity
Use Cloud to Make
On-Premises Apps Better
22

23. Strategy 2: Use Cloud to Make On-Premises Apps Better
App 1
Analytics
App 2
App 3
…
Corporate
Data Centers
App N
Elastic Map
Reduce
Amazon
Redshift
AWS
Storage
Gateway
Backup
Amazon S3

24. Strategy 2: S&P Capital IQ Uses AWS for Big Data Processing
S3
Provides data to
4200+ top global
investment firms
Hadoop Cluster
Launched Hadoop
faster, Learned
Hadoop faster

25. Weather’s Big Data Analytics Platform for Enterprises and Government
TWC’s Redshift Cluster now
contains:
WeatherFX
CreativeFX
Partner
EDW
Platform
Amazon S3
AudienceFX
…
App N
TWC
Private Data
Center
EDW
Amazon
Amazon
Redshift
Redshift
600+ million records of Weather
forecast data since March 2005
700+ million records of Current
conditions observation data since
April 2004
11+ billion records of Int. Civil
Aviation Org. (ICAO) Observation
data since 1970
TBs of Storm event data from from
1950 - 2012
Weather sentiment survey data
~1 Billion records
Bulk loaded in 36
minutes!

26. Weather is more severe
26

27. Weather ⌃ is more accurate
Day 1-3 Forecast – Temperature and Precipitation

28. Weather forecast is more accurate
3, 5, 7 Day Forecast 1980-2010
100
90
Accuracy (%)
80
70
3 day
60
5 day
7 day
50
40
30
20
1980
1990
2000
2010
Source: NCEP
28

29. Taking the World’s most accurate weather forecast into the future and moving
it to the Cloud…
Elastic Load Balancing
Data
Data API
Caching, Notifications, Auth etc.
Government
Autoscaling
Instances
US-EAST
Data
Universities
Research Facilities
Data
Private Suppliers or
Corporates
Multiple Sources
of Data
Weather.com +
Weather Channel, etc
Autoscaling
Instances
APAC
Forecast Core
Proprietary Forecasting Models
Daily roll-ups, worded forecasts,
indices, etc. in 49 languages
Where the science happens
Forecast at 10X points worldwide
Weather Company’s
Next Generation Forecast Platform
Media
Retail
Agriculture
Insurance
Aviation
Energy Trading
Ground Transportation
Marine
Utilities
Emergency Response
Construction
Outdoor Recreation
Military
Construction
Travel & Hospitality
B2B Customers
29

30. Lots of
Users
Elastic Load Balancing
Data
Data API
Caching, Notifications, Auth etc.
Government
Autoscaling
Instances
US-EAST
Data
Universities
Research Facilities
Data
Private Suppliers or
Corporates
Multiple Sources
of Data
Weather.com +
Weather Channel, etc
Autoscaling
Instances
APAC
Forecast Core
Proprietary Forecasting Models
Daily roll-ups, worded forecasts,
indices, etc. in 49 languages
Where the science happens
Forecast at 10X points worldwide
Weather Company’s
Next Generation Forecast Platform
Media
Retail
Agriculture
Insurance
Aviation
Energy Trading
Ground Transportation
Marine
Utilities
Emergency Response
Construction
Outdoor Recreation
Military
Construction
Travel & Hospitality
B2B Customers
30

31. Lots of
Users
Weather.com +
Weather Channel, etc
Data
Government
Autoscaling
Instances
US-EAST
Data
Universities
Research Facilities
Data
Autoscaling
Instances
APAC
Scaling based on
demand
Elastic scaling when huge surge
of user requests
Private Suppliers or
Corporates
Multiple Sources
of Data
Weather Company’s
Next Generation Forecast Platform
Media
Retail
Agriculture
Insurance
Aviation
Energy Trading
Ground Transportation
Marine
Utilities
Emergency Response
Construction
Outdoor Recreation
Military
Construction
Travel & Hospitality
B2B Customers
31

32. Lots of
Users
SEVERE WEATHER
Scaling to provide the
best accuracy
Data
Improved frequency of forecast
updates, more locations, less latency
Government
Autoscaling
Instances
US-EAST
Data
Universities
Research Facilities
Data
Autoscaling
Instances
APAC
More Data Sources
Private Suppliers or
Corporates
Multiple Sources
of Data
sophisticated weighting
scheme
Weather Company’s
Next Generation Forecast Platform
Weather.com +
Weather Channel, etc.
Media
Retail
Agriculture
Insurance
Aviation
Energy Trading
Ground Transportation
Marine
Utilities
Emergency Response
Construction
Outdoor Recreation
Military
Construction
Travel & Hospitality
B2B Customers
32

33. Strategy #2
Augment On-Premises
IT Resources with
Cloud Capacity
Use Cloud to Make
On-Premises Apps Better
33

34. Strategy #2
Augment On-Premises
IT Resources with
Cloud Capacity
Use Cloud to Make
On-Premises Apps Better
Build Cloud Apps that
Integrate with
On-Premises Apps
34

35. Strategy 2: Cloud Apps that Integrate with On-Premises Apps
AWS serves
application
content & data
Integration to
Samsung data
centers for
Authentication
and Financial
Transactions
Hybrid
App
On-Premises
Data Centers
Saved $34 Million
85% savings versus
traditional hosting

36. Hybrid App: TWC Forecast Platform Integrates with Nationally
Distributed Cable Network
Legacy Star Distribution
August 2012
Weather
Forecast
Platform
Hybrid App
integrates back
to
STARs
TV Network
National
Coverage
Star Legacy Area Served - August 2012
4000
Junior
XL
On-Premises
Data Centers
Local on The 8s
4000+
36
STAR Boxes in US

37. Strategy
Migrate Existing
Apps & Data to the
Cloud
37

38. Strategy 3: Migrate Existing Apps and Data to the Cloud
1/3 of servers
migrated to AWS
App
On-Premises
Data Centers
Migrated SAP and
SharePoint Workloads
Saved
£1.5 Million
Saved $1M over
3 years
50% of Traditional
hosting costs
Migrated clinical
trials simulations
platform
Simulations in
1.2hrs vs. 60hrs
64% reduction in costs

39. Our First Real AWS Project : Migrate real-time radar mapping system
wunderground.com to AWS Cloud
Wunderground Radar and Maps
100 million hits a day
One Billion data points per day

40. 30,000
Personal
Weather
Stations
Source: Wunderground, Inc. 2013

41. Before Migration – Traditional IT Model doesn’t scale well
Server Count
Avg. CPU Load
(110 Servers)
HTTP Response Latency
(~6000 ms)
After Migration - Wunderground Radar App
Server Count
(from 110 to 170 Instances)
Avg. CPU Load
HTTP Response Latency
(5-15ms)

42. Strategy
All-in Cloud
42

43. Strategy 4: All-In
100s of applications
supporting 33M+
global members
10,000s of EC2
instances in multiple
regions & zones
At peak consumes 1/3
of US Internet
bandwidth

44. is All-in
TWC’s transformation into a large scale, global, big data platform for the
world’s weather is founded on a All-In IaaS strategy.

45. Strategy 4: TWC’s All-In Cloud Strategy
We are using all 3 strategies
simultaneously across the
enterprise to get us there
lightning fast!
Strategy #1
Strategy #2
Strategy #3
What we are gaining with the cloud:
 Transfer TB’s of weather data
every day globally
 Manage TB’s of digital content
globally
 Handle 1 TB/sec at peak
 Handle 1 Billion requests per pay
 Increase production changes by
20X
 Decrease hosting costs by 30%+
45

46. Key Takeaway: Cloud isn’t an ‘All or Nothing’ Choice
Strategy #1
Strategy #2
Strategy #3
Strategy #4
Build All New
Apps for the
Cloud
Augment On-Premises
IT resources with
Cloud Capacity
Migrate Existing
Apps and Data to
the Cloud
All-in

47. Thank You!
Jinesh Varia
Technology Evangelist, AWS
jvaria@amazon.com
@jinman
Bryson Koehler
EVP, CIO, The Weather Company
bryson@weather.com
@brysonkoehler
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