Case Study: National Geographic achieves unified, personalized content discovery with Amazon CloudSearch

National Geographic Speeds Innovation with Serverless Computing on AWS

National Geographic faced the challenge of making 130 years of multimedia—photos, maps, videos and articles—discoverable from disparate CMSs and formats, while lacking sufficient image metadata to surface content the way users expect. To solve this, National Geographic turned to Amazon CloudSearch as part of an AWS serverless approach (including Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Rekognition, and Amazon SNS) to index and serve content for a new mobile-native app.

Using Amazon CloudSearch indexes together with Lambda-driven ingestion and Amazon Rekognition for automated image tagging and smart cropping, the vendor’s solution created personalized content feeds and notifications and delivered single-portal access to the archive. The serverless architecture sped development—reducing time by months—enabled single-digit-millisecond responsiveness for user profiles and search, and made it possible to surface and preserve the right imagery across the app.

National Geographic

Nik Khilnani

Senior Director of Platform Development