Business challenge ’s websites serve millions of users per day. When extreme weather hits and usage peaks, the sites must be at their fastest and most reliable to provide the information people need to stay safe.

Transformation To optimize for elasticity in handling extreme spikes in demand, The Weather Company worked with IBM to migrate Chris Hill, VP and its web platform quickly and seamlessly Chief Information and from its existing cloud provider to the Technology Officer for IBM Media and IBM® Cloud™. Weather

Business benefits: “IBM Cloud is the perfect The Weather Company, engine to power the world’s largest weather Unlocks an IBM Business websites and deliver the significant cost savings on fastest, most accurate cloud hosting and support Migrating the world’s top weather insight to millions of users around the globe.”

weather web property to Chris Hill VP, CIO and CTO Accelerates IBM Watson Media and Weather deployment of new services a secure, scalable global with Kubernetes architecture in the IBM Cloud

The Weather Company, an IBM Business, helps people make informed Expands decisions and take action in the face of weather. The company offers the most global reach with access accurate forecasts globally with personalized and actionable weather data to a larger number of data and insights to millions of consumers, as well as thousands of marketers and Share this centers in local markets businesses via Weather’s API, its business solutions division, and its own digital products from (weather.com) and Weather Underground (wunderground.com). Instant insight when During major weather events, The Five years ago, The Weather Company The Weather Company made the critical Weather Company relies on its started moving its infrastructure into the decision to architect its new environment it matters most infrastructure to deliver very high cloud, architecting most of its systems on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, which performance when its servers are under around the services offered by its cloud orchestrates container management Many companies build their web the most intense load. Extreme weather provider. The cloud platform helped across an extensive cluster of platforms on the assumption that the systems are often fast-moving and to address the company’s scalability IBM Cloud Virtual Servers. Kubernetes, traffic they need to serve will be driven by difficult to predict, so to handle massive, challenges, but also locked it into using the open-source container management predictable factors. For example, a retailer short-notice peak workloads, the proprietary technologies. platform that has recently become a expects extended seasonal peaks around company depends on the ability to scale de facto standard, provides a powerful, the winter holidays, with sharp spikes up rapidly at any time. Jagmeet Chawla, Global Head declarative way to define how containers for major events such as Black Friday. of Architecture Office and Cloud should be started, shut down and Scaling to handle increased demand can Wendy Frazier, Head of Consumer Web Engineering at The Weather Company, monitored, and what hardware resources be challenging, but long-term planning Development and Content Delivery at says: “Today there are much better they can utilize. IBM provides Kubernetes makes it a solvable problem. The Weather Company, explains: “During options for building cloud solutions on as a managed service, significantly , our sites served close open-source software. To put ourselves in reducing the burden on The Weather Weather websites like weather.com to 9 petabytes of video data in one day. a stronger position to meet future growth Company’s DevOps resources. and wunderground.com, however, It’s really important that the system can and scalability challenges, we decided to face an exponentially harder scalability scale because our volumes can go from re-architect all our cloud services using “In a traditional microservices world, challenge—and their ability to perform one extreme to the other, overnight.” open-source tools in the IBM Cloud. we’d need a lot more DevOps pipeline to at a high level during periods of intense Our web platform was the perfect place handle all this management work,” says demand can literally spell the difference Since weather is a hyper-local to start.” Chris Hill. “Once we start setting up new between life and death. phenomenon, the scalability of the web services with IBM Cloud Kubernetes platform needs to be localized, too. As Service, we expect to see a significant Chris Hill, VP and Chief Information and The Weather Company expands its Designing an time-saving for our DevOps team.” Technology Officer for IBM Watson Media operations into markets such as Japan, and Weather, explains: “Our sites are India and Eastern Europe, it needs to open-source cloud For example, developers can now unique because when they’re operating at be able to harness local data centers platform experiment easily in the languages of scale is when they add the greatest value. to bring its endpoints closer to the their choice, pushing changes to dev The most critical time to provide accurate, user to minimize latency. Localizing its Many of The Weather Company’s web and test systems that are scaled out on timely information is during hurricanes, data centers adds further complexity servers were running in portable Docker separate clusters. Those pushes are tornadoes and severe winter storms, to the scalability challenge, because containers on the company’s existing automated with open toolchains and because that’s when weather insight really each local instance must be able to cloud platform, making them relatively IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery, which helps people keep themselves and their scale independently: a tornado in the straightforward to migrate to a different automates and accelerates build and families safe.” US Midwest creates demand peaks cloud provider. The team viewed the deployment processes. in that region, with little effect on project as both an important first step operations elsewhere. on its journey to the IBM Cloud, and a strong test of the capabilities of the new platform.

2 Jagmeet Chawla agrees: “The way “With many cloud providers, if you want With the IBM Cloud infrastructure With its global reach, IBM can also offer IBM has engineered Cloud Kubernetes security, you have to explicitly configure in place, The Weather Company is The Weather Company an extensive Service, it frees our team to focus on it yourself—their approach is to leave focusing on completing the migration range of 28 data center options in the business requirements, rather than things open until you specify otherwise,” of its web properties before moving 19 countries. In the future, this can help worrying about the operational details of says Jagmeet Chawla. “With IBM, it’s the on to re-architect other aspects of its the company extend its local footprint how to run the cluster.” opposite: you start with full security and infrastructure. The fact that The Weather in emerging markets and continue its relax it only as much as you need to. It’s Company’s systems can coexist easily strategy of minimizing latency by keeping To store static assets—such easier to build systems that are secure across multiple clouds and on-premises web endpoints as close to the user as images and videos—that by default.” infrastructure demonstrates IBM Cloud’s as possible. weather.com and wunderground.com ability to handle the intensive demands of serve to users, The Weather Company “IBM is synonymous with security—that’s enterprise workloads. IBM Cloud also gives The Weather uses IBM Cloud Object Storage. why its clients have so much trust in the Company access to infrastructure- The new storage solution provides IBM brand,” adds Chris Hill. “We are Under the covers, the company manages as-a-service offerings such as highly compatible APIs that make it already speaking with government and an extensive set of core weather systems IBM Cloud bare metal servers. In the easy to interoperate with other cloud financial services clients about future and APIs, which ingest and process future, this could help the team migrate storage platforms—reducing the projects, and the security that the IBM petabytes of data from weather radar services that can’t be containerized need for The Weather Company to Cloud offers is a major selling-point.” and other sources. Additionally, the easily, and support high-performance make significant code changes to its company is planning to expand its use workloads that require specific hardware front-end web applications. From a support perspective, IBM Cloud of IBM Watson® services, such as profiles or custom configuration. provides sophisticated dashboards and IBM Watson™ Captioning for adding “We really like the cross-region replication monitoring tools to help The Weather closed captions to its vast video library, “As far as possible, we want to focus on that IBM Cloud Object Storage System Company team manage its extensive and IBM Watson Assistant to build harnessing the open source platform provides,” says Jagmeet Chawla. “It’s web server estate. The team is using IBM AI-powered chatbots to help online that IBM Cloud provides,” says Chris Hill. easy to configure, and it adds an extra Cloud Logging and Monitoring, together users. The company is also considering “Nevertheless, it’s a major advantage level of resilience. Even if a whole data with familiar third party tools such as harnessing IBM Watson Studio to that IBM Cloud bare metal servers are center went offline, we could still serve Sysdig and Prometheus, which are easy augment its machine learning and deep available if we need them. It opens up content to our users.” to integrate with the IBM Cloud stack. learning capabilities and embed AI into options that we just didn’t have with our its applications. previous cloud provider.” One significant lesson learned during the “As a 24/7 shop, having the right level of project is that although many companies support services and tools is vital,” says “The web platform is a huge of the cloud as a commodity, in Wendy Frazier. “The IBM Cloud team has environment, but it’s really just the tip practice, each cloud provider has a helped us make the transition seamless. of the iceberg,” says Jagmeet Chawla. unique approach that influences the We haven’t needed to add any resources “IBM Cloud will help us rebuild our architecture of the client systems they to our own team, and the infrastructure core systems around open-source host. For IBM Cloud, one of the strongest has been rock-solid.” technologies, such as IBM Compose emphases is enterprise-class security. for PostgreSQL and MySQL, and IBM Analytics for Apache Spark, and then extend these with the latest AI and interactive capabilities.”

3 A bright prospect The biggest gain, beyond pure time- environment. The company is able to savings, is the cultural change. The IBM maintain system availability without Solution components for the future Cloud Kubernetes Service creates less unexpected downtime and without • IBM® Cloud™ Kubernetes Service

separation between development and disruptions when it needs to roll out new • IBM Cloud Virtual Servers The weather.com and wunderground.com operations teams. Developers can build features and updates. sites are now fully in production on the a new system and take it all the way to • IBM Cloud Object Storage IBM Cloud, and The Weather Company the container—a paradigm that can Over the course of the project, The • IBM Watson® Captioning team is impressed with the performance significantly boost development velocity. Weather Company team has forged and scalability of the platform so far. close relationships with the IBM Cloud With IBM managing the Kubernetes engineering team, providing feedback and Take the next step “Our migration has made a fantastic environment and the underlying IBM insight that is helping to shape the future To learn more about IBM Cloud, please contact start,” says Jagmeet Chawla. “The Cloud Virtual Servers, The Weather of the cloud platform. The company is your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit .com/cloud world’s top weather property now runs Company team has more time to focus on also evaluating projects from the open on IBM Cloud, giving us the hyper-scale rolling out new features. Moreover, when source community to understand how Connect with us elasticity we need to handle even the the company needs to move fast on new tools like Istio and SPIFFE can increase most dramatic spikes in traffic. growth initiatives, developers and testers velocity and performance. have immediate access to the additional “Everything is now built around open compute resources they need, without “The most important thing is that we can source technology, and we are freeing the wait time for requesting traditional continue to scale our platforms to help ourselves from technical debt,” he adds. hardware and standing up VMs. people stay safe when extreme weather “The IBM Cloud Kubernetes Services hits,” Chris Hill concludes. “IBM Cloud is is absolutely the right strategic direction Instead of having to do a major cut-over the perfect engine to power the world’s for us, and IBM has done a great job of to the new IBM Cloud platform, workloads largest weather websites and deliver the engineering a service that runs well and is running in The Weather Company’s fastest, most accurate weather insight to easy to use.” existing VMs and its newer containers millions of users around the globe.” are able to coexist in a true hybrid cloud

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