Case Study: Discovery Communications achieves scalable, low-latency global content delivery and 20–25% cost savings with Amazon CloudFront

Discovery Communications - Customer Case Study

Discovery Communications, a global leader in nonfiction media, needed to modernize its website infrastructure without a costly upfront hardware investment, a lengthy migration process for a small team, and while consolidating multiple delivery engines. To get pay-as-you-go flexibility and rapid scalability, Discovery adopted Amazon CloudFront (as part of AWS) for global content delivery and dynamic content/API acceleration alongside other AWS services.

Using Amazon CloudFront with Amazon EC2, S3, ELB, Route 53 and Multi‑AZ architecture, Discovery migrated more than 40 sites (Jan 2012–Jun 2013), now running ~150 EC2 instances and delivering static and dynamic assets via Amazon CloudFront. The move eliminated heavy hardware management, enabled horizontal scaling and faster provisioning, and produced measurable benefits — including 20–25% CDN cost savings, seamless migration without downtime, and improved team capabilities.

Discovery Communications

Igor Brezac

Chief Systems Architect, Digital Media