Washington Post Licenses Publishing Technology to Tronc

The Washington Post has signed an agreement to license its digital publishing platform, Arc Publishing

.. Tronc said it will use the Arc technology to help power its entire portfolio of digital properties, beginning with the Los Angeles Times. Tronc’s other publications include the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore sun and Orlando Sentinel.

 .. The partnership marks the largest yet for the Post’s Arc division, which has previously announced deals with smaller publishers such as Argentinian business news site InfoBae.com and Canadian news publisher the Globe and Mail.
.. “Small publishers with limited budgets don’t actually have too many options here. They can use [content management system] WordPress for content, but what do you do for video? What do you do for apps? What if you want to do Facebook Instant Articles? Putting it in the cloud will benefit those publishers,
.. Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon and now owner of the Post, has had a hand in building the Arc platform, and has encouraged executives at the Post to take a page out of Amazon’s playbook for its Amazon Web Services cloud computing product.

.. The entire Arc platform is hosted by AWS, and publishers pay based on the amount of traffic flowing to their properties once they’re up and running.
.. The Post has previously said it charges large publishers up to $150,000 a month for access to Arc

Why Google’s Answer to AWS Reserved Instances is a Big Deal

This is in sharp contrast to what Amazon offers with RIs — pre-purchasing instance types, which have specific characteristics like “nice network instances” or “GPU instances” or “great storage instances”. Thus with Amazon you’re pre-purchasing a pre-set configuration of CPU/RAM/IOPS/Network/GPU/Disk characteristics with only minimal flexibility (mostly around EBS), and your mobility to other pre-set configurations is severely limited. So you better be damn sure you made the right choice, because you’re living with it for 1–3 years.

.. Google is able to offer this due to the unique nature of Google Cloud. Google Compute Engine under the hood is NOT a service that sells a bunch of VMs running on specific hardware. Compute Engine is an opinionated, living and breathing supercomputer, continuously carving out resources for its clients in the most optimal fashion

.. Do not discount (no pun intended) the technical complexity here. These problems are very very hard. As Eric Schmidt has said, Google’s poured $30 billion dollars over the past three years on this bonfire, and it shows. In the end, users win!