Migrating www.aol.com from a Pro
summary
AOL migrates its main homepage off a decade‑old proprietary stack onto Java + Tomcat + Apache with MySQL, Atomics, NetScaler and a CDN; the 14–15 month project retires ~300 hosts and shifts a site that serves 55 million pageviews/day to standard HTTP. Critical wins are reintroducing caching (previously 99.4% RAM cache hit), gzipping XML payloads, and denormalized atomics to avoid triple‑layer scaling; initial Tomcat CPU problems and network gating require ongoing tuning but the migration succeeds and the old platform is decommissioned.
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chapters (19)
- 0:00AOL homepage transformation
- 1:38Introduction to Dynapub
- 3:50Evolution of aol.com
- 5:42New platform design
- 6:56Managing traffic growth
- 8:04Old platform limitations
- 10:18Legacy tech insights
- 11:49Shared infrastructure issues
- 14:16Proprietary system struggles
- 16:23New tech stack
- 18:49Editorial control and tools
- 20:26New platform growing pains
- 22:18Lessons in scaling
- 24:12Configuration management
- 25:46Knowledge and cache migration
- 28:30Monitoring improvements
- 29:35Resource management
- 31:02Future AOL business focus
- 33:35Q&A and conclusion
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