News UK Manages Cloud Spend and Improves Governance with CloudHealth

News UK, a subsidiary of News Corp., has published newspapers for more than 200 years and has more than 10 million readers. Headquartered in London, News UK publishes The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun, with a mission to “tell the stories that matter.”

News UK faces cloud challenges

An AWS customer, News UK has evolved with the media landscape. It now runs all its digital properties in the cloud, with the ability to scale elastically on-demand as landmark events and news trigger massive influxes of online registrants. With the power of the public cloud, News UK can quickly scale up to meet demand, and back down once the need passes.

“Agility came at a price. When we entered the digital world, we didn’t have a good view into our cloud spend,” says Russell Bradford, Cloud Platform Manager at News UK. “All finance saw at the end of the day is a bill, and the bill was rising every month. We wanted to give them better visibility, but the growth of our AWS environment showed no signs of slowing. We have 60 accounts! People here always want to innovate, spin up instances, and move to the next project.”

Finding a solution

News UK partnered with CloudHealth to gain better visibility into cloud spend across their entire infrastructure. With a holistic view of their cloud ecosystem, they can see “which accounts are spending what, and where spend is increasing.”

"CloudHealth tells us which environments can be shut off outside business hours, saving us more per month."

— Russell Bradford

Cloud Platform Manager, News UK

The team uses CloudHealth to discover unattached EBS volumes, receive recommendations on rightsizing, manage Reserved Instances (RIs), and for security functions such as setting policies and alerts.

The results

CloudHealth helps News UK do the following:

• Identify and eliminate zombie instances. The team discovered more than 1,000 unattached EBS volumes that weren’t in use, but still incurring cost.
• Optimize Reserved Instances. “Reservations are complex,” admits Russell. “People end up fearing them because of that.” News UK saved 40% on its monthly cost by managing RIs with CloudHealth, and uses automation to make continuous modifications.
• Get rightsizing recommendations. News UK had challenges with knowing which EC2 instances were underutilized. With CloudHealth, they can easily see instances that can be rightsized or downsized.
• Enforce centralized governance. Now the team can hold groups accountable for cloud spend, and effectively track and manage changes across the environment. They even automate lights on/off schedules for non-production infrastructure: “CloudHealth tells us which environments can be shut off outside of business hours, saving us more per month.”