Launching HBO.com page by page
I built the CDN services and routing that let HBO.com move from its legacy CMS to a new platform one page at a time.
- Role
- CDN and routing engineer
- Company
- WarnerMedia
- Year
- 2021–2022
- Stack
- CDN edge logic (VCL), Edge dictionaries, Terraform
- environments, dev through production
- 4
- cutover completed
- Mar 2022
- redirects refreshed in a 2026 update
- ~9k
Context
HBO.com was moving from a legacy CMS to the company’s new publishing platform. A site that size could not switch in one night. The plan was to move it page by page, with both systems serving the same domain for months.
What I did
I built the CDN layer that made that possible:
- A reusable infrastructure-as-code module for a CDN service with two backends: the legacy CMS and the new platform.
- The HBO services for dev, QA, staging, and production.
- Page-by-page routing using edge dictionaries: one lookup for which backend serves a path, plus path patterns and a redirect table. Moving a page to the new platform was a dictionary change, not a deploy.
After launch I handled the routing side of incidents, including a redirect loop, and kept the redirect tables current. In 2026 that meant refreshing about 9,000 redirect entries.
Outcome
The cutover finished on March 30, 2022, with pages moved in batches as they were ready. I used the same staged, toggle-based approach again a few years later for the TCM.com cutover.