Case Study: SmartNews achieves automated, scalable deployments and lower costs with Amazon Web Services (AWS) CodeDeploy

SmartNews - Customer Case Study

SmartNews is a news discovery app that uses machine learning to surface top stories from tens of millions of articles and social signals; it serves over 14 million users globally. The company needed to manage a complex software delivery pipeline of microservices (crawlers, extractors, image analysis, search), deploy multiple applications across environments while minimizing operational cost, and ensure Auto Scaling instances automatically receive the latest application version.

SmartNews integrated AWS CodeDeploy with its CI pipeline and Amazon S3 so new commits are built, uploaded, and deployed automatically; CodeDeploy handles ELB updates, fetches revisions, runs custom scripts (model downloads, asset precompilation, Docker deploys), and deploys healthy revisions to new Auto Scaling instances before ELB registration. The result: flexible, scriptable deployments via AppSpec, major engineering time savings, and lower infrastructure cost through safe Auto Scaling integration.

SmartNews