What is Elastic Beanstalk and why do I need it ?

A good question, well posed, and answered by its purveyors, Amazon.

And, as we suggested here, it's perhaps no surprise that the myriad consultants working on myBBC have turned to Elastic Beanstalk for their "personalisation"/marketing needs. Maybe the BBC might have found it's own way there.

But, of course, the BBC wants better - if you get can get your head round this current job description for a myBBC Service Owner, Recommendations.

Service owners play a key role in our engineering function providing whole life technical ownership of our development. Working closely with Product Leads the Service Owners ensure that development is consistent with our world-class quality values and total cost of ownership concerns. They are empowered to recruit, mentor and lead a pool of talented engineers defining the standards, design patterns, tooling and processes to deliver to our audiences. 

The Recommendations proposition will deliver to our top priority products (iPlayer, News, Sport, Music…) providing an enhanced personalised experienced and so is a core component of the myBBC strategy.

Demands will be high regards security, appropriate protection of personal data, and meeting the business’s performance thresholds. Audience trust is at the foundation of the BBC and hence data security is paramount. The Service Owner must be able to promote best practise with respect to security and ensure all deliveries adhere to that best practise. 

To meet the service’s high performance demands we are delivering on the AWS elastic architecture with a view to establishing a continuous delivery approach. This is an exciting time to join us and to influence the shape of software development within one of the UKs most influential organisations.