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Graham Tackley, Director of Architecture, Guardian News and Media

Graham Tackley

Biography: Graham Tackley

Graham Tackley is Director of Architecture at Guardian News and Media. He spent a few years leading the Web Platform Team engineering guardian.co.uk to scale to ever increasing demand. More recently, he's been working to enable the whole organisation to evolve reader engagement in new and innovative ways, and enabling the development team to deliver better solutions faster. He led the implementation of the Guardian's unique Open Platform Content API which provides access to all of the Guardian's current and historical web content.

Twitter: @tackers

Presentation: How Elasticsearch Powers the Guardian's Newsroom

Track: Big Data Architectures - handling too big, too fast or too versatile data / Time: Friday 16:50 - 17:40 / Location: Churchill Auditorium

guardian.co.uk is one of the world's most popular news websites, visited by over 80 million unique browsers every month. Yet in the past, their journalists and editors found it difficult to get meaningful, timely data on what people were reading.

In response to these issues, Graham and colleagues at the Guardian built "ophan", an in-house real-time analytics system based on Elasticsearch. By working closely with journalists and editors, they've focused on what they can action to provide a better experience for the Guardian's existing readers and enable more people discover their unique content.

In this talk, Graham will dive into the details of ophan - obstacles faced by the newsroom that prompted them to build the system, how it works for alerting and how the tool has made the Guardian's readers - and staffers - lives better. While Graham explores this real world use case, Shay will cover the technical underpinnings of ophan with a deep dive into the Elasticsearch features and functionality that power the ophan system.

Attendees will leave with a solid understanding of Elasticsearch's features and architecture, all gained through the lens of a real-world and hyperlocal use case.