Add initial AWS blog post #364
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| title: Thanks to AWS for supporting Read the Docs for many years | ||||||
| date: 2025-07-28 | ||||||
| category: Meta | ||||||
| tags: sponsors, aws, thanks | ||||||
| authors: Eric Holscher | ||||||
| status: published | ||||||
| image: | ||||||
| image_credit: | ||||||
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| Read the Docs has been building and hosting documentation for open source projects since 2010. | ||||||
| We’re proud to be a part of the open source ecosystem, | ||||||
| and today we wanted to take a moment to thank one of our biggest supporters: **Amazon Web Services**. | ||||||
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| We have been a member of the [AWS Open Source Credits](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/aws-promotional-credits-open-source-projects/) program since 2021. | ||||||
| In that time, | ||||||
| they have provided us with **almost $500,000 in credits**, | ||||||
| which covers all of our server-related costs each year for the Community platform. | ||||||
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| This post will cover a bit more about how we use AWS, | ||||||
| the infrastructure we run on it, | ||||||
| and how it helps us support the open source projects that rely on Read the Docs. | ||||||
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| ## Our scale | ||||||
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| In the past 30 days, our Community hosting platform has: | ||||||
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| * Supported over **100,000 open source projects** with documentation hosting | ||||||
| * Run over **350,000 documentation builds** | ||||||
| * Handled over **250M documentation pageviews** | ||||||
| * Served over **2.2 billion web requests** | ||||||
| * Transferred over **45TB of data** | ||||||
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| Since our creation in 2010, | ||||||
| we have been a cornerstone of the Python open source ecosystem, | ||||||
| and now host documentation for many other languages and frameworks as well. | ||||||
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| ## Our infrastructure | ||||||
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| Read the Docs has a pretty simple architecture, | ||||||
| because we have a small team of 5 people running a very large web service. | ||||||
| The major AWS services that we rely on are: | ||||||
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| * **EC2**: We run our web servers, web workers, and build servers on EC2 autoscaling groups. | ||||||
| This allows us to scale up and down as needed, leading to builders always being available when projects need them. | ||||||
| * **S3**: We store all of our documentation artifacts in S3. | ||||||
| This includes the HTML files, PDFs, and other outputs generated by our build system. | ||||||
| * **RDS**: Our primary and replica Postgres databases are hosted on RDS. | ||||||
| This allows us to scale our database easily, and we rarely have to think about it. | ||||||
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| We use a number of other AWS services as well, including Cloudwatch for monitoring, Route 53 for DNS, and many more. | ||||||
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| ## A few of the projects we host | ||||||
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| {% import "partials/marketing.html" as marketing %} | ||||||
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| Here are just a few of the big projects whose docs we build and host: | ||||||
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| - [**Godot Engine**](https://docs.godotengine.org/) – the open source 2D/3D game engine behind thousands of indie titles and student projects. | ||||||
| - [**Jupyter**](https://docs.jupyter.org/en/latest/) – the open source project that powers Jupyter Notebooks, used by millions of data scientists and educators worldwide. | ||||||
| - [**Flask**](https://flask.palletsprojects.com/) – the Python web framework powering everything from hobby APIs to production workloads at scale. | ||||||
| - [**Python Developers Guide**](https://devguide.python.org/) - the official guide for developing Python itself, maintained by the core developers. | ||||||
| - Tens of thousands of other open-source libraries. Browse the documentation of the libraries, software, and services you use and it won't take long to find a project whose docs we host. | ||||||
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| <div class="ui very padded container"> | ||||||
| <div class="ui very padded raised segment"> | ||||||
| {% call marketing.testimonial( | ||||||
| name="Max Hilbrunner", | ||||||
| title="Software and Game Developer", | ||||||
| company="Godot Engine", | ||||||
| image="https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/1654763?v=4", | ||||||
| link="https://docs.godotengine.org/") %} | ||||||
| Read the Docs plays a large part in enabling a small volunteer team to maintain our docs. Without the generous Community plan, we couldn't have afforded anything close to the CI/build resources that we got with Read the Docs. | ||||||
| {% endcall %} | ||||||
| </div> | ||||||
| </div> | ||||||
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| ## Features that make Read the Docs unique | ||||||
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There was a problem hiding this comment. This section feels off topic for a blog post about AWS. I get we probably should have some content describing us if AWS is linking to this post, but I think that content should target users that have no idea what RTD is. So, something more like a CTA to learn more, and pointing to a page with a more basic description of RTD would probably be best. There was a problem hiding this comment. Aye... definitely a good point. I wanted to highlight the quote and built the paragraph around it, but I think we can use the quote in a similar fashion talking about how S3 has enabled us to build PR builds perhaps. There was a problem hiding this comment. That's a great idea, that should fit really well. |
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| There are many places to host your documentation, | ||||||
| but Read the Docs is unique in a few key ways: | ||||||
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| * **Free for open source**: We provide free hosting for any open source project, with generous limits on builds and storage. | ||||||
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| * **Versioning**: Easily version your documentation with tags and branches, giving users access to the exact version of the docs they need. | ||||||
| * **Pull request builds**: We automatically build pull requests, so you can see how your project changes over time. | ||||||
| * **Visual diff**: See a diff of the rendered documentation when doing reviews, allowing you to easily see what changed in the docs. | ||||||
| * **Offline formats**: We provide a way to download your documentation as a PDF or ePub, so you can read it offline. | ||||||
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| <div class="ui very padded container"> | ||||||
| <div class="ui very padded raised segment"> | ||||||
| {% call marketing.testimonial( | ||||||
| name="Matt Fisher", | ||||||
| title="Scientific Software Developer", | ||||||
| company="UC Berkeley Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment", | ||||||
| image="https://github.com/mfisher87.png", | ||||||
| link="https://jupytergis.readthedocs.io/") %} | ||||||
| Read the Docs is a critical component of the open source software ecosystem. And their PR builds are the best and most trustworthy implementation out there. | ||||||
| {% endcall %} | ||||||
| </div> | ||||||
| </div> | ||||||
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| ## Thanks to AWS for supporting open source | ||||||
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| Keeping all this documentation online, building every commit, storing every artifact, and serving content to the entire world—costs a *lot* of money. | ||||||
| We have been given almost $500,000 in credits from AWS since 2021, | ||||||
| which covers the lion’s share of our Community infrastructure bill each year. | ||||||
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| These credits are important for us in a few major ways: | ||||||
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| * They support open source by allowing us to give generous free tiers to any open source project, because we don’t have to worry about the costs of hosting. | ||||||
| * They support our team, because it lets us focus on building features that matter to our users instead of worrying about trying to cobble together funding for our infrastructure. | ||||||
| * They provide a better user experience, because we can use autoscaling builders, instead of a fixed pool of donated builders. | ||||||
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| Without partners like AWS, | ||||||
| our Community site wouldn't be the reliable home for documentation that it is today. | ||||||
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