Case Study: Guardian News & Media achieves automated subscription fulfillment and on-time newspaper delivery with Amazon Web Services

Guardian News & Media Automates Subscription Fulfillment Using AWS Step Functions

Guardian News & Media (publisher of the Guardian and the Observer and owner of theguardian.com) faced growing reliability problems in its subscription processes as customer data lived across many disparate systems. Orchestrating flows between the primary database and multiple third-party services was fragile—new subscribers sometimes didn’t appear in the database, checkout errors went untracked, and deliveries were at risk—so GNM sought a low‑code orchestration solution to automate fulfillment without adding large amounts of custom integration code.

GNM implemented AWS Step Functions with AWS Lambda (alongside Amazon Kinesis and Redshift) to coordinate workflows such as subscription fulfillment, ETL pipelines, and automated account deletions, including retry logic for failing third‑party services. The result was reliable, automated orchestration that ensured accurate daily subscriber lists and on‑time newspaper delivery, enabled background processing when billing systems were down, cut technical support time by about 80% (≈4 hours/week), and made workflow building accessible to more developers.

Guardian News & Media

Paul Brown

Senior Developer Manager