Case Study: Tiso Blackstar achieves a reliable, autoscaling news platform serving 53M+ monthly page views with Google Cloud Platform

Tiso Blackstar Creating a new online news environment

Tiso Blackstar Group, South Africa’s largest national English publishing group and the country’s second-largest digital publisher (titles include TimesLIVE and SowetanLIVE), faced major scalability and reliability issues from an outdated, monolithic CMS and a fragmented stack of Java, .NET and PHP backends. Traffic surges—especially during breaking news—caused frequent degradation and outages, forcing heavy manual maintenance and limiting the company’s digital growth.

Consolidating its CMS and services on Google Cloud (App Engine, Compute Engine, BigQuery, Stackdriver and other managed services) created an autoscaling PaaS that eliminated downtime, cut administration overhead, and improved BI and data-driven journalism (BigQuery enabled rapid analysis of leaked emails that led to major scoops). The platform now handles 53M+ page views per month for under $20/hour, freeing engineering resources for new initiatives.

Tiso Blackstar

Alistair Gordon-Watt

DevOps Manager