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Not to knock Amazon here, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with a publically funded British institution running on American-owned servers. I known we live in a Globalist world now, and even if the BBC ran their own servers it would probably be running on American produced hardware (Dell)...
What do people think? Am I worrying about nothing?
Britain leads the world in destroying its own industries in favour of international suppliers. In theory, that will lead to more prosperity in Britain, but in reality the competitors it invites in have usually been massively subsidised by their home countries, so the positive effects are harder to discern.
Having said that, I can’t really see the benefits of the BBC building their own AWS any more than I can for building their own power stations (provided the dependency is abstracted and can easily be swapped for a competitor).
I guess its somewhat similar to the situation with the transmitter masts, which are owned by Canadians and Australians:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arqiva
If the competitors have indeed been subsidised by foreign countries, that's a nice transfer of wealth from those countries to Britain, and, given the low historical success of government industrial subsidy, one that only the British will benefit from.
In a world without a level playing field, the solution to poor quality industrial policy is better industrial policy.
Foreign subsidies don’t result in a net transfer of wealth if they undercut your otherwise competitive domestic industry, for obvious reasons. It results in a misallocation of capital and the erosion of opportunities that should have otherwise existed domestically.
All countries engage in free market distortion, to varying degrees. That may well be a suboptimal use of their resources, but unfortunately it also hurts countries that don’t respond in kind and who have bought into some simplified economic policy slogans.
I can relate to this sentiment.
I would rather have seen they host it physically within the borders of the country, with a 'good' local hosting/cloud provider.
The added cost is the cost of that kind of 'security'.
It's probably hosted in AWS' London region, so at least geographically it's within the borders of the country.
CLOUD Act makes that completely moot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Primarily the CLOUD Act amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil.
https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/cloud-act/#:~:text=Does%20...
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I think that if the order is not legal in the UK, AWS doesn't have to comply with a US judge
The UK can do the same depending on situation to the US, granted the US can just ignore it if they really want to.
Most modern countries have backdoor privacy systems, 5 eyes was literally designed for it since they can't spy on their own citizens, they have a group from another allied country do it and give them the info.
Are there any local cloud providers in Britain?
If you're worried about the BBC running on AWS, how do you feel about government departments with more sensitive data, like the Home Office, and HMRC, using it?
I personally wouldn't feel great about it.
Do they?
Yes
https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/manual/govuk-in-aws.h...
The political relationship between the UK and US are pretty healthy, so I don't think there's much to worry about at this point.
That said, if they do need to move out, it would be manageable - setting up a lambda runner on self-owned hardware is pretty straightforward I believe, and everything else can be otherwise virtualized, so they aren't bound to AWS' infrastructure. In theory.
I think this is a cross-post of the medium article. Previous discussion on HN here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24967601
And cue the vendor lock-in blogs from the future
Mostly off topic but as an american, I much prefer the calmer way news casters in the UK speak when delivering the news over the overly dramatic, exaggerated, weird tone that is used in the US.
As a Brit, I agree. It makes the news show feel less like serious reporting, and more like a televised tabloid, bereft of sincerity. Journalism isn't meant to be an exercise in theatre.
_edit_ Thinking about it, the term _news show_ relates back to my point about theatre. Perhaps I should try to use _news programme_ instead. From a quick search, the BBC use both terms.
Just avoid some of the newspapers, lol.
See also yesterday's thread, _Moving BBC Online to the Cloud_.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24967601
_edit_ I see damagednoob got there first.
_edit 2:_ Looking at the before-and-after screenshots near the end of the post, it doesn't strike me as an obvious UI improvement. They've slightly shrunk the featured photo, they've reduced the contrast of the caption, and have made less efficient use of the available screen space, so that the top 3 lines of the article are no longer visible when it first loads.
The thing that kills me with this, is that it must be such a pain in the backside to build, scale, and manage. I'd love to make use of these technologies, and I work for a suitably large organisation - but I'm not a one man army and this requires a serious team with some serious depth to it, invested time and remuneration overheads.
How do I handle users, roles, permissions, application logic, database, forms, content, publishing, etc? Wordpress. It may not be in vogue, but its all there and I can deploy it pretty quick.
Is there a solution I can pick up that will run as a static site, make use of serverless, and not take forever to build out?
There are numerous MVC frameworks for any given language. Some even give you admin control panels out of the box if you need a quick and basic admin. Trying to contort Wordpress into some kind of application framework will arguably take longer to build out than using purpose-built frameworks. Even something as basic as routing is quite convoluted in Wordpress.
BTW wordpress can be used as a headless CMS. Your content creators use the wordpress interface and then you use it to build your static site from there. How much this is actually better than just using wordpress with cloudflare plugin, I don't know.
Yeah. Most CDNs and caching plugins deliver a substantially similar result in that regard I suspect. My sites rely a great deal on granular group permissions and contextual display of accessible items. Gut feel is id be coding for days to replicate tick box functionality.
There are some cms solutions up and coming that build on that kind of infrastructure, but I’ve seen nothing yet that can compete (for small teams) with Wordpress.
Wagtail is pretty good on the non static site version of that (there is a thing to make it publish to a static site too).
Maybe Next.js and AWS Amplify fits your bill?
What’s the authoring and workflow side of this? Seems like it would be entirely custom?
Amplify has its own (Rails like) workflow, with its own CLI and it comes with libraries for JavaScript and UI components for React.
Next.js has its own workflow, with its own CLI, etc.
The only thing missing is integrating the two, so it's not "entirely custom".
Investigate JAMStack.
Initial investigation reveals that this is just an index of static site generators and management interfaces that don't really address the points I raised.
I'd love to see the architecture for this... Tho, I did hear they now have 200 lambdas a second firing to serve the content. That seems incorrect based on the efforts on the caching layer.
Anyone else know more?
That's probably a very tiny fraction of their request footprint so it doesn't surprise me.
This.
If you only got 100-1000 users, then 200 Lambdas per second is much.
But if you got millions of users, it's not.
I sort of wonder why it isn't a content workflow in the background that triggers (say) a push to Fastly or Cloudflare to update a subset of cached content.
Or maybe it is that, and that still takes 200 lambdas/sec.
From the article:
> About 2,000 lambdas run every second to create the BBC website; a number that we expect to grow.
The BBC has been using AWS for quite some time, although, obviously, not for everything as this article shows.
If it were me, Kubernetes with Kubeless, so you can switch vendor or self-host relatively easily.
I never understood why media companies continue to reinvent the wheel. What’s commercial benefits if at all any? I guess, good for everyone’s CV. Build better media products, but no let’s build another publishing system.
> What's commercial benefits if at all any?
That's the brilliant thing about the BBC. None, and it does not matter.
It's a publicly funded organization. They cannot make money by law (excluding BBC World).
Any organisation as large as the BBC design their online media around making users buy more products. UX, a/b testing, research, all about making you buy something even if you didn't want to buy it. If the website isn't trying to sell you something, it's trying to collect your information to sell or provide others opportunities to sell to you.
For the BBC you have none of that. That means everyone working at the BBC is working on providing the best user experience and content where you freely choose to visit because of the quality and content. Even if you don't like the content, critique the site, disagree or find faults with it, that doesn't change the fact the people creating it believe it's the best experience for a user. I've yet to work anywhere with all development being driven by UX and the UX member being one of the most respected people on the team. Their metric for success is visitors happiness, not profit from sales.
They are also on tighter budgets, a political target, and legally can't compete with other commercial organisations. That means they can't always do things as well as they can do as some company will complain they are stealing their customers. That's why IPlayer has stagnated as an example.
While their current lambda rendering wouldn't be something I'd personally do or recommend, it's also likely not CV building. The BBC is a billion pound, large, corporate organisation. Change is hard, deviating from the norm is hard, sometimes the process can make it hard to get things done. So ending up where they are now was probably a gradual process of trialing things over the years, capabilities of staff skills, and so on.
The BBC has many faults but the lack of "What's commercial benefit" makes for doing fantastic work. It was the only meaningful work I've done in my career so far.
As a bonus to the above they also open source a fair bit too
I don't thing there is a mature, flexible CMS out there for publishers. AEM is more appropriate for marketing and old school web pages. Doesn't work for long lived content, journalism or publishing to diverse platforms and formats (AMP, native)
What publishing system would you suggest, the BBC could use?
I am unable to suggest anything as I am out of touch these days. 5 years back every media CIO/CTO wanted to have Adobe AEM paired with Wordpress. Then they realised Adobe AEM is way too costly so decided to build authoring experience in-house but still using Wordpress and like for rendering and delivery. Recent trend use JAMStack/SSR for rendering. Don’t get me wrong it’s all great but doesn’t solve real problem media businesses face these days.
Good, they need it especially with #DefundTheBBC going on