Case Study: The Seattle Times achieves rapid auto-scaling and faster reader experiences with Amazon Web Services

The Seattle Times - Customer Case Study

The Seattle Times, a family-owned news organization founded in 1896 and winner of multiple Pulitzer Prizes, attracts about 7 million unique monthly visitors to seattletimes.com. After nearly two decades on on-premises hardware the paper moved to a fully managed hosting vendor but found it sacrificed flexibility and could not reliably scale to handle large, fluctuating traffic spikes tied to breaking news.

The Times rebuilt its publishing stack on Amazon Web Services—using Amazon VPC, EC2, EBS, RDS, S3, CloudFront, Route 53, ElastiCache and Lambda—and migrated the site in a single overnight deployment. Auto-scaling and serverless image resizing cut latency and operational overhead, restored control over the backend, reduced costs by scaling down during slow periods, and improved the reader experience, with AWS Support helping validate the architecture and best practices.

The Seattle Times

Rob Grutko

Director of Technology