Stabilising the Headlines

The Challenge

Pacific Magazines, Australia's number one magazine publisher with brands including New Idea, Marie Claire, and Home Beautiful (16 brands in total), needed a more stable platform to host their online content management system. The publisher later became part of Seven West Media.

Growth in the digital channel and spiky website traffic had put significant strain on the existing hosting platform. Engineers were spending their time on platform stabilisation, often after hours, instead of working on innovation and new digital products. The company wanted to advance their websites beyond being digital copies of their published magazines, but the underlying infrastructure was holding them back.

The platform was unable to handle traffic surges that accompanied major news events. When a major story broke and audience numbers spiked, the sites would buckle under load, reducing engagement, increasing page abandonment, and decreasing SEO authority. These reliability problems threatened to undermine the company's brands and reputation with both readers and advertisers, directly impacting revenue. The publisher needed a solution that could handle unpredictable traffic spikes without manual intervention.

The Approach

A combined team of architects and engineers from Kablamo, AWS, and the publisher worked together to plan and execute the migration from the existing hosting environment to AWS. The team brought together cloud architecture, DevOps, and delivery management expertise from Kablamo alongside the publisher's engineering and digital leadership.

The design, build, testing, migration, and optimisation for the first two brands was completed within eight weeks. Home Beautiful and New Idea were cutover to run live on AWS, serving as the proving ground for the migration approach before rolling it out to the remaining 14 brands.

The deliverables included:

• Pre-production environments that mirrored production, enabling safe testing before cutover
• Automated continuous delivery pipelines replacing manual deployment processes
• Container orchestration for consistent, scalable application hosting
• Training and documentation using a "we do, you do" competency model to build internal capability
• Automated toolsets and repeatable migration frameworks for the remaining 14 platform migrations

The "we do, you do" approach was central to the engagement. Rather than simply migrating the platforms and handing over the keys, Kablamo worked alongside the publisher's engineers throughout the process. Each step was performed collaboratively so the internal team built real understanding of the new environment, not just documentation to read later. This meant the publisher's team could handle subsequent migrations independently.

The migration approach prioritised the brands experiencing the most acute stability issues, allowing the team to demonstrate value quickly while building confidence in the new platform. Each migration followed the same repeatable process: assess, plan, build pre-production, test, cutover, and validate. This consistency reduced risk and compressed timelines as the team moved through the portfolio.

The Results

The migration delivered measurable improvements across every dimension. Page load times improved by 50% on desktop browsers and 20% on mobile. Platform availability reached 99.99%, eliminating the after-hours stabilisation work that had been consuming engineering time. Audience traffic expanded by 24% as faster load times and improved reliability boosted SEO authority and reduced page abandonment.

The new AWS platform proved its resilience almost immediately. Just days after cutting over, the platform withstood a major DDoS attack that generated a 500% spike in traffic. Where the previous platform had buckled under far smaller surges, the AWS infrastructure absorbed the load without any impact on user experience. During a subsequent high-traffic news event, the platform handled over 200,000 daily visitors without issues, compared to the previous infrastructure which had crashed at a fraction of that volume.

The migration also delivered significant cost savings through reduced staff overtime and lower platform hosting costs, while adding capabilities that the previous environment lacked: CloudWatch logging for real-time monitoring and alerting, automated DDoS mitigation through AWS Shield, and faster content delivery through CloudFront and AWS edge infrastructure. These operational improvements meant the engineering team could respond to issues proactively rather than reactively.

Looking Forward

With near-zero downtime and no effect on user experience during the transition, the publisher now avoids the revenue losses and brand damage that had accompanied platform outages. Advertisers can rely on consistent audience delivery, and readers experience fast, stable access to content across all 16 brands.

The digital team now has the time and knowledge to research, evaluate, and build new digital products rather than firefighting infrastructure problems. Engineering effort that was previously consumed by after-hours stabilisation and incident response is now directed toward innovation and growing the digital business.

The competency model and repeatable frameworks delivered during the project equipped the internal team to handle the remaining 14 platform migrations independently, turning what could have been a multi-year dependency on external support into a self-sufficient capability. The automated toolsets mean each subsequent migration follows the same tested process, with consistent quality and predictable timelines. The project was also published as an AWS case study.