Since joining The Weather Company, Koehler has transformed the IT organization to support the company’s business growth strategy. “AWS offers a responsive environment with massive data movement, replication and synchronization to help meet the demands of our digital transformation at scale and on a global distribution level,” he says. “The Weather Company’s business strategy is focused on four S’s: science, safety, storytelling and services. Using AWS allows us to focus on the most important aspects in our business in a cost-effective manner.”

By launching an API-driven platform on AWS, The Weather Company has been able to bring products and services to market faster. “Using AWS means that we’re not hamstrung by infrastructure,” says Koehler. “When we wanted to launch a new forecasting system, the requirements for doing that internally would have taken as much time, money and effort as it would to write the code. We started the project in April 2013. Now our weather API is one of the world’s most-used public APIs. The platform is robust enough to handle between 10 and 15 billion transactions each day at 100,000 to 150,000 per second, depending on the weather.”

The Weather Company’s cloud strategy has reduced its on-premises environments from 13 to six data centers. “The less my engineers have to worry about power, cooling, racking, stacking, and other operations tasks, the more they can focus on the business,” says Koehler. “They can focus on being application engineers, building resiliency into the apps, and improving network and application efficiencies. Those sorts of savings are hard to measure, but you can’t go from 13 data centers down to six without realizing significant savings in time and management.”

Running on AWS has also been cost-effective for The Weather Company. “Anyone who thinks running on the cloud is more expensive hasn’t really totaled up all the true costs,” says Koehler. “A forecasting system like ours is a steady-state load; it runs all the time. That’s not a traditional

cloud computing value proposition, but by running on AWS instead of on-premises, we’re saving almost $1 million per year on just one application. If I can get a win on a forecasting application that runs consistently 24/7, I believe that anyone can get a win on applications, especially those with spikes in demand.”