Over the past year Neil has removed his records, CDs, and streaming music from Amazon in protest of Jeff Bezos’ personal and financial support of Donald Trump and his destruction of the once great Washington Post newspaper.
Now, the final connection to Amazon, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the division of Amazon that hosted our website and apps, has been terminated. NYA is now running on DigitalOcean.
Over the past two months, NYA’s software team planned and executed a major upgrade and migration of our music delivery platform from AWS to DigitalOcean, a cloud computing provider whose business practices align more closely with our beliefs.
Once we identified DigitalOcean, our development team worked closely with their technical staff through a series of collaborative sessions to design the new infrastructure, determine the required configurations, and map out each phase of the migration across our cloud storage, servers, databases, and content delivery network.
Beyond the migration itself, we also redesigned and upgraded the streaming workflow to improve speed, scalability, and reliability for our members. The platform architecture was modernized with the introduction of a new “hot storage” layer that temporarily caches popular audio content closer to our members. In simple terms, this allows frequently accessed music segments to be delivered much faster without repeatedly retrieving or processing them from long-term storage.
As a result, members will benefit from faster stream startup times, smoother playback, and quicker downloads across varying network conditions, particularly during periods of peak traffic. Let us know how you like it.
We hope other organizations will also consider moving away from AWS in protest. We at NYA are happy share our experiences.
About Digital Ocean DigitalOcean (https://www.digitalocean.com) was founded in 2012 with the mission to make cloud infrastructure simple, affordable, and accessible for developers and growing businesses. While companies were building platforms optimized for large enterprises, DigitalOcean deliberately focused on the people building software: developers, startups, and small to midsize businesses, who needed reliable infrastructure without the complexity or cost overhead of AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. That developer-first philosophy has shaped everything from the company’s pricing model to its documentation, and it’s what’s attracted more than 600,000 customers across 185 countries. Today, DigitalOcean offers a full suite of cloud services. The company went public on the NYSE in 2021 and continues to expand its product portfolio with a particular emphasis on making AI infrastructure accessible to businesses that aren’t Google-scale but still need serious compute.