Case Study: Lonely Planet achieves 10x faster builds and 30% lower infrastructure costs with Amazon Web Services

Lonely Planet - Customer Case Study

Lonely Planet, the global travel publisher, needed to transform how it created and delivered content for web and mobile as readers shifted to smartphones and tablets. Its Melbourne-based, leased server infrastructure couldn’t support the company’s new agile and DevOps practices—developers were doing as few as four builds per day with long build times—while leases were ending, forcing a re-evaluation of its hosting approach.

Lonely Planet migrated its development, test and production environments to AWS in stages, using Jenkins and automated build agents and leveraging services such as EC2, Auto Scaling, ELB, RDS, CloudFront, S3 and Route 53. The move cut latency (from 250 ms to 15 ms in Sydney), reduced India site page loads by 50% with edge locations, and enabled automated environment provisioning in 15–20 minutes. Developers now complete up to 30 builds per day, costs for the shared publishing platform fell about 30%, availability improved (no downtime since launch), and the company can scale to meet spikes—its apps have been downloaded over 12 million times.

Lonely Planet

Darragh Kennedy

Online Platform Manager, Lonely Planet.