BBC Online Moves to AWS, Serverless
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
What do people think? Am I worrying about nothing?
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'.
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.
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.
I think that if the order is not legal in the UK, AWS doesn't have to comply with a US judge
Do they?
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
Anyone else know more?
If you only got 100-1000 users, then 200 Lambdas per second is much.
But if you got millions of users, it's not.
> About 2,000 lambdas run every second to create the BBC website; a number that we expect to grow.
Or maybe it is that, and that still takes 200 lambdas/sec.
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.