Huffington Post selects Typesafe

The Huffington Post is a leading online news source founded by Arianna Huffington, Ken Lerer, and Jonah Peretti. Contributors include more than 3,000 bloggers - from politicians and celebrities to academics and policy experts - who contribute in real-time on a wide range of topics. The site started as a politics blog, but now covers more than 20 categories, including media, business, entertainment, living, style, sustainable “green” living, world news, technology, nonprofits, college life, and comedy. It began launching local versions in 2008 and increasingly is experimenting with social networking features.

“Eight years of growth allowed our company to accumulate a lot of technical debt and we were really paying the price,” explains Adam Denenberg, Huffington Post’s Vice President of Engineering.” “Our publishing platform was incredibly fragile. The infrastructure was very tightly coupled; things were hard coded all over the place. And it was at the point where it was really preventing us from being agile and developing more quickly.” Adam Denenberg decided that it was time for a change.

Fundamentally, the biggest issue was scalability, and with two and a half billion page views a month Huffington Post gets a lot of traffic. At any given time they have at least 150,000 concurrent users, a commenting platform, all these services, and they rely heavily on caching. A key aspect of scalability is efficient resource utilization, and with the very large vertical boxes with lots of CPU’s and RAM.

With a lot of the big media companies like Tumblr, Foursquare, Twitter and Gilt Groupe moving to Scala, there was clearly a precedent being set for similar media companies that were achieving really great results with the technology.

A big factor in the decision to use Scala and Play, however was the value that Typesafe brought to the table with commercial support and training from the original authors and architects of the products they would be using.

“Scala was new to the group, so having commercial support and training was a big benefit for Huffington Post,” shared Adam Denenberg. “We’ve had really good success getting quick resolutions to questions. Plus, when we wanted some help with Slick, a Typesafe consultant came out for four hours. We got ten people in the room and got everyone up to speed. That’s the kind of responsiveness and engagement that we really like.”

The Typesafe Reactive Platform is a modern software platform that makes it easy for developers to build scalable software applications. It combines Play Framework, Akka runtime, the Scala programming language, and robust developer tools in a simple package that integrates seamlessly with existing Java infrastructure. Commercial support and maintenance is available for the Typesafe Reactive Platform through the Typesafe Subscription.