Case Study: The Huffington Post achieves a scalable, resilient global publishing platform with Akka

Huffington Post’s new Publishing Platform on Typesafe

The Huffington Post, a leading online news site with more than 3,000 bloggers and roughly 2.5 billion page views per month, faced an eight-year-old, tightly coupled publishing platform that had accrued significant technical debt. Fragile tooling made editing workflows cumbersome, and the architecture could not easily support massive traffic, global editions, caching requirements, or secure multi-tenant deployments—so the engineering team needed a modern, scalable platform to enable faster development and international growth.

HuffPost built "Athena," a gradual-replacement platform using Scala, Play, AngularJS and MongoDB, backed by Typesafe training and commercial support. A small five-person team delivered a Play front end and veneer APIs that enable real-time collaborative editing, simpler editor workflows, and incremental migration from legacy services—improving developer productivity, operational scalability for global deployments, and the day-to-day experience for editors already using the new system.

The Huffington Post

Adam Denenberg

Vice President of Engineering