A CDN for RNZ

www.rnz.co.nz

Radio New Zealand (RNZ) is Aotearoa New Zealand's independent public service media organisation. During the Covid-19 epidemic RNZ was so trusted by the public to deliver high-quality journalism that our audience numbers more than doubled between February and March 2020.

I led the implementation and change management of putting a CDN in place on the main publishing platform of rnz.co.nz, to replace existing, on-premises Varnish cache servers that were failing under unprecedented audience growth. I managed the Go-Live carefully so that the public did not see any interruption to news publishing as the architectural change happened.

Toolbox

We chose Fastly as our CDN provider as they have POPs based in Aotearoa and we could adapt our existing Varnish Cache Language rules into the managed service. I had to upskill quickly in areas of AWS infrastructure management that I was not familiar with, get super familiar with VCL and Fastly’s features, and manage expectations of stakeholders and risks for the organisation. I also coordinated a Go-Live with multiple comms channels and many fine-grained technical steps.