CSC’s use of cloud computing started with a need to stream videos of its Tour de France bicycle racing team on its company web site.
CSC had a solution which worked well, using an outside content delivery firm that had servers deployed around the world. This ensured that those looking at the video would have a good, consistent experience. The problem was that this was an expensive way to run a non-core, promotional application.
When Amazon S3 file storage was announced in 2006, the CSC.com staff conducted some tests. They found that using S3 was not as fast as using their dedicated content delivery provider, but it was fast enough for a generally good experience. They tried using S3 for the 2006 Tour de France and it worked just fine, at 5% of the previous price.
This success led CSC.com to experiment with a variety of Amazon services. Today, while the site is still hosted by CSC (which provides the security and robust infrastructure CSC requires), nearly all large downloads and multimedia files on the CSC web site are served from Amazon. Amazon’s EC2 is also used for development and testing, especially for load testing to make sure that peak loads can be handled. The open source code management system, Subversion, is used as a repository on Amazon.
The ease of cloud development and testing also led to a complete re-write of the content management system for the site. What was once 650,000 lines of Java code was reduced to fewer than 10,000 lines by using the open source Ruby On Rails web application framework — and the new system has far more functionality than the original.
It’s a powerful example of the cloud’s potential to increase speed and agility.