News

AWS Gets More Biz from Dunkin' Brands, The New York Times

• By David Ramel
• 04/19/2017

In the cloud computing wars, signing up high-profile customers is important ammunition, with Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and other major players being quick to publicize big wins.

Today, for example, AWS announced that Dunkin' Brands Group Inc. has chosen it to provide cloud infrastructure, following a report yesterday from Data Center Knowledge that The New York Times will also throw more business to the Amazon cloud provider.

Dunkin' Brands -- the parent company of Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins -- has reportedly moved its on-premises mobile apps, e-commerce Web site and some corporate IT infrastructure applications to the AWS cloud.

Those mobile apps are used for tasks such as reviewing menus, ordering ahead and redeeming rewards, along with letting customers pay for their orders or send virtual gift cards. By moving those and other infrastructure components to the AWS cloud, Dunkin' Brands hopes to reap rewards such as better scalability, reliability, availability and security, along with reduced costs and improved digital experiences for customers, AWS said in a news release today.

"Our mobile applications and digital properties are an absolutely critical way through which we reach our customers and they must be secure, available, and high performing at all times," said Dunkin' Brands exec Santhosh Kumar. "We selected AWS as our cloud infrastructure provider for these key business applications due to the depth and breadth of the AWS services, and their experience in securely managing enterprise applications. AWS also provides us with redundancy to help us meet our goals of high reliability and availability, robust security and optimal performance for our applications, and the ability to quickly add capacity on demand when needed."

Meanwhile, Data Center Knowledge yesterday reported that The New York Times is planning to shut down some leased datacenters and move their operations to AWS and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The report stated: "All applications that depend on Oracle databases will be deployed on AWS, while most of everything else will run in containers on GCP, orchestrated by Kubernetes. 'Plus, some other apps that we prefer to run on [virtual machine] instances will probably remain in AWS, mainly packaged enterprise IT apps,' [Times CTO Nick Rockwell] wrote in an e-mail."

The report noted that the newspaper already used some GCP and AWS services, with the latter including a virtual private cloud and several public cloud services.