Case Study: Fairfax Media achieves scalable, real-time storytelling and 1,000 qps search delivery with Elastic

Fairfax Media - Customer Case Study

Fairfax Media, a leading Australian and New Zealand news and services group (smh.com.au, theage.com.au, stuff.co.nz and classified/transaction sites), faced a fragmented content ecosystem: many authoring systems and partner feeds, large-scale content reuse and curation needs, and multi-channel delivery requirements (sites, apps, widgets, Facebook IA, AMP, Apple). The business also needed to support real-time alerts, high query volumes, bounded query complexity, and multi-region disaster recovery while replacing legacy syndication and search layers.

They implemented a pipeline architecture centered on the Elastic Stack (storing JSON‑LD/Schema.org), with AWS Kinesis for ingest/outbound, Logstash/Kibana for logging, an API gateway with signed queries and a publish/subscribe delivery model, plus primary and DR Elastic clusters and Percolate for alerts. The result was a unified content API and delivery pipeline that scaled to high QPS and CDN loads, simplified custom query complexity, enabled migration off legacy systems, and provided a clear path to multi‑region DR and large‑scale alert/pub‑sub delivery.

Fairfax Media

Jeremy Kelaher

Head of Architecture for Product Technology