Nikkei Migrates User ID Platform Serving over 10 Million Subscribers to AWS for Business Agility and Improved Developer Experience

Nikkei has developed a wide range of interests in publishing, broadcasting, e-media, databases, economics, and culture since first publishing its core media brand, The Nikkei newspaper. The Nikkei online edition has amassed over 830,000 subscribers since launching in 2010, and combined with the print edition, it has over 2.5 million subscribers (as of July 2022), the highest in the news field. The Nikkei ID subscriber platform, which was launched together with the Nikkei Digital Edition, consists of registered users of the online services of Nikkei and Nikkei Business Publications, and currently boasts more than 10 million subscribers, making it one of the largest in Japan.

In 2015, Nikkei acquired the Financial Times (FT)—a digitalization leader—and shifted focus to in-house system development. At that time, the Nikkei ID platform ran in an on-premises environment, which meant heavy workloads dealing with technical debt and frequent hardware failures.

“The greatest challenge was finding capable IT personnel,” says Yoko Kuramochi, General Manager of Nikkei’s Platforms Group. “With the accelerating digital shift, we couldn’t find engineers to run and maintain legacy systems. We had to improve the developer experience and create an appealing environment for them to thrive.”

Nikkei had been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) since 2011 when it adopted an internal cloud platform for many systems, including The Nikkei online edition and B2B services. Aiming for an ID system with greater agility and security, the company decided to migrate to AWS while performing an on-premises hardware upgrade. However, internal compliance prohibited using cloud-based systems containing personal information, so executive approval was required. To gain permission, Nikkei researched case studies of domestic and international corporations and government agencies, formulated company-wide cloud usage guidelines, and enhanced security controls.

“As a newspaper company, information gathering is at our core,” says Kuramochi. “To sharpen our argument, we collected case studies of cloud-based systems handling personal information. The FT referred us to some western media like the New York Times to get opinions from its board members, which was particularly effective in securing approval.”

The Nikkei ID platform migration project started in December 2020, and after defining requirements, the company migrated its systems from February to December 2021. The basic plan involved shifting existing servers and databases to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) unchanged, while introducing Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) for modernization elsewhere.

Nikkei automated infrastructure provisioning with Infrastructure as Code (IAC) for operational management and adopted the Amazon CloudWatch managed service for monitoring. “After team members reviewed our situation, we decided we had to alter our infrastructure configuration to maintain security, which made IaC essential,” says Yuya Urano of the Platforms Office.

The migration project team included Nikkei employees and personnel from a partner in charge of running the on-premises system. Nikkei handled modernization, and it split the lifting work with its partner.

Nikkei also commissioned an experienced Amazon Partner Network (APN) partner to migrate its commercial database—the main function of the system. The migration employed two methods based on data type.

“Many different systems use Nikkei ID, so a full shutdown was difficult,” Urano explains. “This meant using AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), which migrates databases to AWS quickly and securely with minimal downtime, for tables with mandatory updates and an import/export method (Data Pump) for safe and reliable migration of tables that aren’t updated. We tested duration, system load, and data errors before the migration to fully prepare.

Migrating the Nikkei ID System to the cloud solved numerous issues, such as the workload of handling technical debt, increasing work hours, and the difficulty of securing IT personnel, which allowed the company to move forward with the digital transformation (DX) strategy of the Nikkei Group. “The greatest benefit has been dramatically improving developer experience, eliminating a barrier to securing talent,” says Yuichiro Watanabe, Head of the Platforms Office. “Our new environment lets developers work with more agility, so Nikkei ID updates are easier. This means we can accelerate over 80 Nikkei ID-related service updates between Nikkei and those from our partners.”

For instance, Nikkei’s developers have cut service deployment times in half; they can freely spin up servers in pre-deployment tests and stop them when testing is done; and managed services automatically collect logs, making management a breeze. And because management screens can be accessed remotely, engineers can run servers from outside the office. This has improved the developer experience.

Nikkei plans to gain a deeper, longer-term understanding of customers with Nikkei ID, providing the right services at the right time of a user’s life cycle—from gaining employment to marriage, career change, succession, and retirement. The company has identified media, education and careers, and asset formation as key areas. Kaoru Hoshi, General Manager of the Business Development Group, says, “In terms of media, we’ll collect information for businesspeople through Nikkei bulletins and various other formats. For careers, our group provides a site for finding new careers, and Nikkei Business School offers career support advice and information on changing jobs and generating side income. 

And we liaise with group companies such as Minkabu and QUICK to provide a variety of information on asset formation. We’ll also work with corporate partners to assist the growth of businesspeople in healthcare, events, and other areas.”

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