Monrif: Keeping traditional news dailies alive in the digital world
About Monrif
Through subsidiaries, Monrif S.p.A. prints and publishes books, newspapers, and magazines in Italy aside from holding interests in hotels, internet journals, and radio broadcasting.
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Contact usWith Google Cloud as its new infrastructure, Monrif embarked on a digital transformation to provide readers with the best possible online version of its traditional newspaper publications.
Google Cloud results
- From one year to four months to update the CMS of an entire newspaper environment
- Readers enjoy a seamless online experience while Google Kubernetes Engine manages peaks of traffic to eliminate glitches
- Delivers a full content page to readers within two seconds of them clicking to visit the site
From weekly to daily releases in a modern architecture
If you’ve ever browsed through a newspaper in Italy, it’s likely you’ve come across Monrif S.p.A.. The publisher prints monthly magazines, books, and four well-known daily Italian newspapers, among them Il Resto del Carlino, the first daily newspaper in Emilia Romagna, founded in 1885. In keeping up with an increasing move towards online reading, Monrif decided to embark on a digital transformation to provide readers with the best possible electronic version of the traditional newsprint daily. That’s when Romolo Samuele Velati, now CTO at Monrif, came into the picture in 2022.
"Digitizing news is not a new concept for Monrif, but it requires a rethinking of our products and services to make it so in an optimal way for our readers," Velati explains. Monrif’s infrastructure needed a new CMS and a new architecture to support it.
Previously, Monrif relied on a hybrid infrastructure, part on premises and part hosted on another cloud provider. As a result, "our older sites were difficult to update and mobilized multiple teams to make this happen, from journalists and editors to technicians along the CI/CD pipeline. This required a lot of organization to create a new front end for our daily news, and often the result was lagging in terms of loading speed for our readers," Velati explains.
The vision was to increase production speed and improve the user experience by building the CMS and front-end on an entirely new architecture using the modern principles of scalability, performance, testability, and deployability. To build it, Velati selected Google Cloud as his infrastructure provider of choice.
"Google is easy to use and very open-source friendly, which was refreshing for us, coming from a provider that promoted more of a vendor lock-in situation," Velati recalls. "Our engineers enjoy working with the Google architecture and feel like they are learning skills that are cutting-edge and applicable to many scenarios beyond this digital transformation project."
"Google is easy to use and very open-source friendly, which was refreshing for us coming from a provider that promoted more of a vendor lock-in situation. Our engineers enjoy working with the Google architecture and feel like they are learning skills that are cutting-edge and applicable to many scenarios beyond this digital transformation project."
—Romolo Samuele Velati, CTO, MonrifDelivering news based on modern architecture principles
To make the digital transformation effective, Velati first focused on changing the CMS to load and deliver content faster, and make the resulting websites load seamlessly for readers. To that end, his first mission was to reconstruct Monrif’s infrastructure on which this entire content management process is based.
A new CI/CD pipeline, to test and deliver new releases to production, was created with Cloud Build. Meanwhile, Terraform is used to provision the infrastructure necessary to deliver the newspaper’s website to readers, making it easy for Velati’s team to modify the IaC using the architecture of services that support each website. That’s where Google Kubernetes Engine comes in, providing scalability and infrastructure management automation by connecting directly to GitHub, the code repository. "Past initiatives to update the CMS had taken one year, if not longer. With Google Cloud as our foundation, we did all this for Il Resto del Carlino in just four months," shares Velati.
Because this new pipeline makes it easy for Monrif to correct errors quickly before deployment, Velati’s team can now create the newspaper’s environment in one or two days, from development to production.
"Developing a site instance in the previous architecture was a highly intricate process, requiring the coordination of multiple environments. Releasing these sites was also a complex task because there were no integration tests in place to ensure smooth deployment," says Velati. "With a hybrid system, releases happened once a week and required many tests. Now, the release is very fast using Google Cloud and all the instruments it provides for integration tests. For developers, it’s easy to create a modification into delivery immediately. You can do a release on Friday and be sure it won’t break during the weekend."
While Monrif’s new protocol makes it easier to update articles and create new pages for the online newspaper, Google Kubernetes Engine ensures the pages can scale to as many readers as possible. "Seamless and instant scalability are key for us to provide a good reader experience," Velati explains. "With our previous hybrid architecture, there were times when the websites were not as responsive. Now, we can sustain peaks of traffic with no worries. Users don’t notice any glitches or delays going into the site, no matter the time of day."
Optimizing the reader experience, on every device
Beyond the ease of use, Velati looks to Core Web Vitals as parameters to measure the site’s performance. He’s already noticed an increase in traffic arriving at Il Resto del Carlino online, credited to the site’s faster performance and smoother user experience.
Meanwhile, Monrif is looking at the possibility of using Google ML capabilities to further support the sites. "There are many instruments across Google Cloud that we want to leverage to improve the reader experience. Data analytics and ML can help us understand what pages are working or not, and how to improve them," Velati explains.
Another interesting result of this new architecture is that Monrif has been able to remove AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) from its sites. AMP is an open-source HTML framework optimized for mobile web browsing and intended to help web pages load faster. But sometimes this introduces friction to the user experience: for example, readers may be asked to agree to the terms and conditions of having that site be displayed by a third party, or the layout of the AMP will differ from the real site. This used to be the case for readers of Il Resto del Carlino on mobile, but now, delivering its real site is seamless on any device.
Velati is impressed by the difference achieved for the websites built on the newer architecture. "Loading time is an important indicator that we’re in the right direction because our industry moves fast and competition is fierce," he notes. "As a publisher, we aim to deliver a full page to readers within two seconds of them clicking to visit our site. Our architecture built on Google Cloud enables us to do this."
"Loading time is an important indicator that we’re in the right direction, because our industry moves fast and competition is fierce. As a publisher, we aim to deliver a full page to readers within two seconds of them clicking to visit our site. Our architecture built on Google Cloud enables us to do this."
—Romolo Samuele Velati, CTO, MonrifSetting the technological foundations for the future of news
Having successfully digitized Il Resto del Carlino using its new protocol, next on Monrif’s roadmap is to roll out this digital transformation to more newspapers. La Nazione is currently being moved into the new architecture, then Il Giorno and Quotidiano Nazionale will follow suit. In addition, Monrif plans to launch new publications and brands using the same architecture.
Although the transformation is not yet complete, Monrif is comparing its expenditure in the previous architecture to now and already finding a positive total cost of ownership outcome. "By the end of this digital transformation project, we expect to see costs cut in half compared to our previous architecture because our new infrastructure is easier to maintain and Google is more cost effective than our previous cloud provider. Saving costs in infrastructure means we can invest elsewhere to innovate and improve our products."
"By the end of this digital transformation project, we expect to see costs cut in half compared to our previous architecture, because our new infrastructure is easier to maintain and Google is more cost effective than our previous cloud provider. Saving costs in infrastructure means we can invest elsewhere to innovate and improve our products."
—Romolo Samuele Velati, CTO, MonrifTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Monrif
Through subsidiaries, Monrif S.p.A. prints and publishes books, newspapers, and magazines in Italy aside from holding interests in hotels, internet journals, and radio broadcasting.