Case Study: The Guardian achieves a high-performance, scalable mobile platform with Akka

Delivering on The Guardian's digital-first vision

The Guardian, a major international news organization pursuing a “digital-first” strategy, faced the challenge of modernizing a legacy, monolithic web platform (originally tied to Tcl/PL‑SQL and later a Java/Spring/Hibernate stack) that slowed feature delivery and innovation. Needing a scalable, maintainable foundation—especially to support a new mobile experience—the team sought technologies that would let them move faster without throwing away existing Java investments.

They adopted the Typesafe platform—gradually converting Java to Scala and using Play 2.0 and Akka—so they could reuse Java assets while gaining high concurrency, simpler async code, and web-friendly tooling. The mobile site (m.guardian.co.uk) launched in November 2012, serves over 2 million daily page views, has surpassed 100 million total views, runs on EC2 with zero downtime, and the Guardian now mandates Scala and Play as architectural standards.

The Guardian

Grant Klopper

Technical Lead for the Mobile Site