Arc XP goes serverless to cope with surging growth

The serverless wave continues to wash over the enterprise based on its integration into areas like analytics.

As a cloud-native, SaaS-based digital experience platform built on top of AWS, Arc XP, a division of The Washington Post, took the serverless route to boost its app-modernization journey based on a soaring customer base, according to Joe Croney (pictured), vice president of technology and product engineering for Arc XP.

“Our choice to go serverless was driven by growth and need to make sure we had exceptional experience, but most importantly that our engineers could be focused on product development and responding to what the market needed,” Croney said. “Arc XP was built for The Washington Post’s internal needs many years ago, and word got out about how great it was built on top of the AWS tech stack. And other publishers came and started licensing the software. We’ve moved from there to B2C commerce, as well as enterprise scenarios.”

Croney spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Savannah Peterson at AWS re:Invent, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Arc XP has a tradition of full-stack engineering that supports a serverless approach. (* Disclosure below.)

Analytics come into the picture

As the media landscape continues to evolve, companies have to deal with business-model innovations and omnichannel distribution. Arc tackles these challenges through analytics that handle issues like user behaviors and the global distribution of content, according to Croney.

“It’s about telling a story and having it go across multi-channels, multi-sites, and having the infrastructure both technically and in the workflow tools is super critical for our customers,” he said. “And it is a challenge that we receive well — applying AI/ML to do detection, suggest photos that might be appropriate based on what a journalist or a marketer is writing in their story. So, there are a lot of opportunities around that sort of data.”

Arc XP’s roots in The Washington Post is its secret sauce, according to Croney, who said that going serverless enabled the engineering teams to be more innovative rather than deal with problems in this space.

“Originally built by The Washington Post for The Washington Post … so designed by digital storytellers, for storytelling,” he pointed out. “The urgency of what it takes to get a story out, the zero tolerance for the site going down — that DNA really enables our engineers to do great solutions.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent:

(* Disclosure: Arc XP sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Arc XP nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE