Case Study: Discovery Communications achieves scalable, cost-effective global digital media delivery with Amazon Web Services

Discovery Communications - Customer Case Study

Discovery Communications, a global leader in nonfiction media with 155 television networks and a presence in 218 countries, needed to modernize its website infrastructure without a large upfront hardware investment. With a small team, multiple delivery engines to consolidate, and requirements for pay-as-you-go pricing and rapid scalability, Discovery sought a solution that would simplify management and let them scale quickly to meet variable demand.

Discovery migrated its US digital properties to AWS, running about 150 EC2 instances with EBS, custom AMIs, ELB inside a VPC, S3, Route 53, and CloudFront for both static and dynamic/API delivery, using Multi‑AZ deployments for resilience. Between January 2012 and June 2013 they moved 40+ sites, gaining horizontal scaling, faster provisioning, a continuous-delivery platform built on AWS APIs, and 20–25% CDN cost savings, while freeing the team to focus on higher-value engineering.

Discovery Communications

Igor Brezac

Chief Systems Architect, Digital Media