Case Study: Northern & Shell achieves 40% traffic growth while keeping costs flat with Amazon CloudFront

Northern & Shell - Customer Case Study

Northern & Shell, a UK media group behind titles such as OK!, Star, and the Daily Express, needed to support rapid digital growth with an agile, cost‑efficient IT platform. The publisher sought better performance, capacity, and availability to improve the customer experience, encourage innovation and experimentation, and reduce time to market. To address these challenges it adopted AWS services, including Amazon CloudFront as its content delivery network.

Northern & Shell implemented a combination of Amazon S3, Amazon EC2 with Auto Scaling, Amazon RDS, and Amazon CloudFront for content delivery, and launched a large‑scale analytics project on Amazon Redshift. With Amazon CloudFront accelerating delivery and the AWS stack providing scalable infrastructure, traffic grew 40% while overall costs remained flat and instance count rose 20%. The result was smoother site performance, near‑zero downtime, and faster rollout of new services.

Northern & Shell

Denis Haman

Chief Technology Officer