Moving BBC Online to the Cloud

https://medium.com/bbc-design-engineering/moving-bbc-online-to-the-cloud-afdfb7c072ff

by LaSombra • 6 years ago

109 65 6 years ago

sgt• 6 years ago

My gut feel is that they've absolutely overcomplicated it now, justifying large DevOps teams to make sense of and maintain the whole architecture.

toomuchtodo• 6 years ago

With time will come cost concerns, and it’ll end up back on prem, maybe using Kubernetes, maybe not.

goatinaboat• 6 years ago

With time will come cost concerns

Especially as cancellations of TV licenses gather steam.

This is a classic example of the iron law of bureaucracy, that work expands to meet the number of people to do it.

Angostura2• 6 years ago

The BBC is facing a massive cash crunch right now they need to do everything they can to save cash right now I suspect this isn't a long term strategy so much as an act of desperation.

howlgarnish2• 6 years ago

This quote is telling:

The BBC’s site is made up of several services (such as iPlayer, Sounds, News and Sport). For them all, we need to ensure they use the latest and best technology. That’s the only way to ensure they’re the best at what they do.

"We need to use new shiny because new shiny is the best!"

qz2• 6 years ago

They've always been like that. I had the misfortune of having to integrate with some of their stuff they'd thrown on to ruby on rails back when it was teetering on the top of hype mountain.

Realistically 99% of their back end at the time was bits of sticky tape, perl and ftp. They just changed those components out for modern versions of sticky tape, perl and ftp...

iso16312• 6 years ago

"We need to use new shiny because we pay peanuts and if we make people still write in perl like the olden days we wouldn't have any staff"

tiew9Vii3• 6 years ago

Yes.

Previously they mostly used a typical lamp stack in the front end. The php apps pulled data from Java backend services. They had a strict separation policy.

The different parts of the bbc where essentially different apps with a proxy in front doing path based routing.

You’d generate a RPM with your php app / Java app and that got deployed.

That had a few drawbacks mostly around process, it was a pain to get releases out as had to go through a single team who could deploy your rpm. You also had the inflexibility of a fixed sized pool of servers in a dc you manage.

When they first started using cloud that mostly remained the same but streamlined process. You provide a rpm using the current lamp/Java stack, a build process baked that in to an ami you could deploy. That made deployments more flexible in you was not constrained by the current physical hardware available and removed the dependency having a specific team do the deployment manually on a shared host.

I imagine the hosting started to get expensive with the dedicated hosts per service. Im guessing slowly the more they used aws services and trialing things they ended up where they are which sounds super complex.

I’m not familiar with where they are now other than the article but I’d bet going back to an app such as php, Java, ruby whatever on the fronted and binpacking them with kubernetes would be simpler than dealing with thousands of lambdas on a black box runtime. Most of the stuff at the bbc hits the edge proxies/cache anyway so the remotes are fairly idle.

comice3• 6 years ago

I run the News Sniffer[1] project which has to parse BBC News pages and I knew about this rollout a few weeks ago when the HTML all changed format completely and my parsers broke.

As a side note, the new HTML is way more complicated and much harder to parse than before - I know the aim isn't to help parsing for content, but I was still saddened to see how it's ended up (a bit of a mess imo - hard to distinguish actual article content from other things).

If anyone knows a reliable and public way to access the content before the "web rendering" layer, that'd be very handy!

[1] https://www.newssniffer.co.uk

Angostura2• 6 years ago

They still have a full set of RSS feeds do they not?

comice3• 6 years ago

yes, though the page linking to them hasn't been updated since 2011. And notably, it doesn't have the new HTML: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10628494

But the RSS feeds are just the headlines. And also don't contain every article ever - only the latest ones with a limit. So not much use to News Sniffer.

mdaniel• 6 years ago

If they have a mobile app, often looking at the requests that it makes can be enlightening, and the same story if the have a mobile version of the site, as it tends to have less "fluff" and more content

I also know they have a moderately public Nitro API for their media programming (the iPlayer offerings) so it's possible they have a similar one for their web content

tiew9Vii3• 6 years ago

The BBC was huge on semantic web and rdf a few years ago. When you start using React and using the tools and techniques common with React or even just composing your site follow today’s common methods the semantic web is extremely difficult, especially with elements being created at runtime in the browser adhoc.

It’s kind of where we started in the early 2000s and gone full circle. CSS was created to remove the intended style of the site being crafted by the structure of the content. We now have CSS frameworks that dictate how you define the content for layout to take effect.

Is CSS Garden still even a thing these days?

Jaruzel2• 6 years ago

You may find the amp pages slightly easier to scrape.

i.e. This: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/health-54795657 vs This: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54795657

I'm working on a similar thing at moment (BBC html -> markdown) so also exploring the best way to do it.

comice3• 6 years ago

nice thanks, that looked promising but I've checked a number of older articles and they have no amp version (despite the HTML for the site referencing an amp version, the url is 404!)

I'll see if I can figure out if all newer pages will have permanent amp versions, or whether all amp versions drop away over time.

pedro1976• 6 years ago

Maybe my side project rss-proxy [0] might be interesting for you. It analyzes the dom and extracts the articles, so ideally you would not need to write a parser manually.

[0] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy

ldite• 6 years ago

I notice that the previous post from the same author, dated 2017, was titled "Powering BBC Online with nanoservices" [0]. Nary a mention of nanoservices now. If I were a cynic, I would say they are going out of fashion.

[0] https://medium.com/bbc-design-engineering/powering-bbc-onlin...

howlgarnish2• 6 years ago

They're still using Lambda heavily, they've just dropped the buzzword.

graton• 6 years ago

I wish they would compare the costs switching from their self-hosted system to a cloud based system running on AWS.

tomgp• 6 years ago

Agreed, there’s very little discussion of concrete benefits here just vague assertions that this is the best way to do it (except for lighthouse test results which could surely have been fixed much more cheaply by cleaning up the incredibly woolly markup).

Also: they still can’t get two parts of the same page to consistently show the same live football result. This seemed to break about 10 years ago and no one seems to care enough to fix it.

azalemeth• 6 years ago

Me too. The other argument, of course, is that instead of spending 10x on (taxpaying) staff and employees within the UK, in order to create a new technology that may be useful and solve other problems, they are spending 1x on Amazon. Amazon will not pay any tax within the UK, and, moreover, have motives that are arguably aligned to the detriment of the BBC.

I'm slightly sad to read about the change. In many ways, I'd rather the perl duck tape & php approach, running on real computers that the BBC owns. Maybe that officially makes me old.

ti_ranger• 6 years ago

instead of spending 10x on (taxpaying) staff and employees within the UK, in order to create a new technology that may be useful and solve other problems, they are spending 1x on Amazon.

You imply that Amazon/AWS doesn't employ any staff in the UK, which is wrong.

Amazon will not pay any tax within the UK

Amazon must certainly pay taxes in the UK, or at least the tax ends up being paid on Amazon share price increases from employees share vesting.

tiew9Vii3• 6 years ago

You can submit a freedom of information request https://www.bbc.co.uk/foi/requesting-information .

Asking for a yearly spend on AWS and self managed dc’s since 2014 might help as they only started using AWS around then.

iso16312• 6 years ago

Worth a go, I suspect that will be deemed commercially sensitive though.

crehn• 6 years ago

BBC still has a frustrating bug on mobile:

  1. Tap on Most Read
  2. Tap on any story
  3. Tap back in the browser

It'll go back to the Most Read tab, then after a second switch to the Latest Stories tab.

jonathanlydall• 6 years ago

This.

Drives me nuts, it seems to reload the page as you go back into it.

ralph873• 6 years ago

Running a site the size of the BBC on Lambda is nothing short of an exuberant waste of a government-subsidized budget, it's absolutely crazy.

Lambda VM time has a massive markup compared to regular compute. It only makes sense where usage does not exceed some threshold the BBC absolutely certainly do.

There are plenty of alternative options, even on AWS, that don't suffer from such huge markup without requiring any additional ops input. The thing that runs in Lambda is practically a container image already. Does it really cost tangible budget to have CI build a full image rather than a ZIP file that already contains a few million lines of third party JS/Python deps?

IMHO this is the epitome of serverless gone wrong.

jevgeni2• 6 years ago

Completely agree. What also irks me is the corpspeak sleigh of hand, where the problem of maintaining your infrastructure is “solved” by using AWS Lambda. It’s not solved, you’re just paying some AWS contractors to do it for you and you assume it’ll be alright.

remus• 6 years ago

It’s not solved, you’re just paying some AWS contractors to do it for you and you assume it’ll be alright.

In as much as maintaining infrastructure can ever be 'solved', doesn't paying someone else who does a good job of it to provide you with the infra count as solving the problem? Otherwise you'd be down the mines picking ore out of the ground so you can build your chips right, rather than relying on intel/AMD to do it for you and assuming it'll be alright.

strainyy• 6 years ago

There wasn't any mention of cost, so you're making a big assumption here. I imagine the caching layer would significantly reduce the Lambda calls.

oppopower2• 6 years ago

AWS Lambda $0.20 per 1M requests $0.0000166667 for every GB-second SLA 99.95%

Lets assume - 2000 calls/sec - each call is 1 sec duration - 0.128 GB/sec/call - db, storage iops will be the same if deployed as K8s - 5x9s SLA (imples a three region deployment)

requests per year = 2000 * 3600 * 24 * 365 = 63072000000 request costs = 0.2 * 63072000000 / 1000000 = 12,614 USD

GB/sec per year = 0.128 * 2000 * 3600 * 24 * 365 = 8073216000 GB/sec costs = 8073216000 * 0.0000166667 = 134,553.87

Total cost = 12614 + 134553.87 = 147,167.87 USD

The equivalent K8s would be - three clusters - 2000 cores (more likely 10% more = 2200) - 256GB memory

Three clusters will require 3000 cores to cater for region loss - 3000 cores on 32 core machines => 94 machines - round up to 99 machines to give vm level redundancy => 33 machines per cluster

Azure D32a_v4 (32 core, 128 GiB, 800 GiB storage) = $1.84/hour PAYG; $0.5704/hour Spot

DS32a_v4 at spot pricing = 99 * 0.5704 * 24 * 365 = 494673.696 USD

Plus FTE support (e.g. n FTEs @ 100k USD)

With 2 FTEs total is 694,673 USD

Summary: AWS Lambda is 4.7x cheaper than a Kubernetes solution

smarx0072• 6 years ago

What you are missing are the Amazon API Gateway costs. I really liked my own calculations on Lambda costs similar to yours until I figured I'd need to use API Gateway too.

Edit: another thing is the amount of RAM used by functions. The CPU speed you get is proportional to RAM so if your code fits in the RAM but has poor performance, doubling the RAM is what you have to do. Another hidden cost.

dougmoscrop4• 6 years ago

I responded lower, but dude! 2000 requests a second is hardly anything at all, unless the application server is doing some seriously heavy lifting in which case the architecture is wrong.

You should redo the calculations with 1gb of memory for Lambda and like 30 machines would be generous

Concurrency is key. Requests don't cost much when they're just waiting for other things, but Lambda continues to pile costs on for every increase in concurrency.

APIs should maybe use a tiny fraction actual real CPU time. Perhaps BBCs are different - In order to make an actual fair comparison and properly predict what they would need in servers, greater detail is needed than what you have available to you, but I think your estimations are off by a significant amount.

sudeepj• 6 years ago

Tangential:

Is this official BBC tech blog?

If yes, I am surprised they are using medium. I would think that an org of this reputation, history & size would host their own blogs.

jlelse• 6 years ago

Der Spiegel in Germany does the same.

jonp888• 6 years ago

They do host their own blogs, this is a cross-post: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet

Possibly it's a sensible way of bringing it to a wider audience, since usually their blog content will be specific to UK-based BBC content consumers.

rozab2• 6 years ago

The BBC has a big problem with cargo cultery right now, copying large social media companies for the hell of it despite having completely different aims. For instance, if I tap the livestream on the homepage it will lie that I need to sign in to watch it, though the popup can just be dismissed. It's shocking that they've adopted useless metrics like conversion to justify user-hostile behaviour.

OJFord• 6 years ago

I don't think you're supposed to be able to dismiss it - it's not about conversion, you're supposed to need an account so that you've had to agree 'I have a television licence'.

timthorn• 6 years ago

The BBC has been explicit that it is about data collection. You don't need a licence to listen to the BBC radio stations but they have switched to requiring a login: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

rozab2• 6 years ago

Oops, I was slightly wrong here. It says "You will soon need to sign in to watch". Still very misleading imo.

https://i.postimg.cc/yNKT82sp/Screenshot-20201104-102848.png

This is part of their online news service so shouldn't need TV license.

Jaruzel2• 6 years ago

My main issue with the BBC news site is it's awful Search.

There's no option to filter, or sort the results, making non-super-specific searching almost impossible.

I know I could do site:bbc.co.uk/news in Google, but uh, it's Google, so I'd rather not.

dna_polymerase• 6 years ago

Use Startpage for that. It's basically a proxy to Google.

say_it_as_it_is2• 6 years ago

I'd like to understand how the team decided to move all of the BBC services entirely to serverless infrastructure. How is serverless the best solution for a heavily used platform? What lead management down this path?

shinytech2• 6 years ago

Good question, could it be the cost or at least the illusion of cost saving? I do not know but it will interesting to see how much they are saving, if they do?

say_it_as_it_is2• 6 years ago

Managers don't publicize mistakes and costly lessons learned. There's only going to be this announcement.

They made a big mistake riding first class on the hype train.

Traster• 6 years ago

The BBC seems extremely good at building large, complex websites. They appear to have acheived this ability by chooosing to continuously build new large, complex websites. Obviously as an organisation the BBC isn't actually doing many new things and as a result the BBC's engineering department has been forced into an awkward position where they're continuously building the same new large complex website. It's stunning that the first part of this article wasn't what they wanted to actually acheive by writing a new website beyond the obviously false "For them all, we need to ensure they use the latest and best technology. That’s the only way to ensure they’re the best at what they do."

Frankly I giggled a little with the image showing a spot the difference. Well done, you spent tens of millions and the website looks identical.

p6steve• 6 years ago

This is the natural result of building a publicly funded empire of literally hundreds of ex-perl hackers in a room and telling them (i) justify your job and (ii) you are not allowed to do anything different because the BBC must not compete with private sector websites. Looking forward to the next iteration in raku using My::Cro.

SPBS• 6 years ago

I visited https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54702974 to confirm the lighthouse scores in their article, but the Performance consistently scored ~30 instead. Why is there such a large gap between what I'm seeing and what they're seeing?

Moving BBC Online to the Cloud

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