New York Times Uses Power of Cloud computing to Archive digital Photos
This new blog series contains a list of illustrative examples highlighting current uses of cloud computing in both established business and start up enterprises. The idea is to demonstrate the power and value proposition of viable cloud computing service offerings and the benefits derived by companies that have availed and adopted those services.
New York Times: This is one of the most cited examples of cloud computing offering. It is from a well know newspaper New York Times
The challenge:
The New York Times has a large collection of high-resolution scanned images of its historical newspapers, covering the period 1851-1922. They wanted to process this set of images into individual articles in PDF Format.
The Cloud computing Solution
Using 100 EC2 instances, they were able to finish the processing in just 24 hours for a total cost of $ 890 ( $ 240 for EC2 Computing time and $650 for S3 data transfer and storage usage, storing and transferring 4.0TB of source images and 1.5TB of output PDF. An executive of New York Times noted that “In fact, it worked so well that we ran it twice, since after we were done we noticed an error in PDFs”. The New York Times was able to use 100 servers for 24 hours at the low standard price of ten cents an hour per server.
The traditional approach
If New York Times has purchased even a single server for this task, the likely cost would have been in excess of $890 for just the hardware, and they also need to consider the cost of administration, power and cooling. In addition, the processing would have taken over three months with one server. If New York Times had purchased four servers, it would take nearly a month of computing time. The speed of operation- fast enough to run the job two times- and at vastly lower cost provides a strong illustration of the superior value of cloud offerings or services
