Broadcast Beat Magazine 2018 NAB Show Edition | Page 107
Analyzing media cloud
migration choices
By Shailendra Mathur,
Vice President of Architecture, Avid
The media industry is under-
going a dramatic transforma-
tion from traditional on-premise
infrastructure to cloud tech-
nologies. As media organiza-
tions make this move, they face
multiple infrastructure host-
ing choices and porting meth-
ods. In order for enterprises to
map their current studio-based
workflows to the cloud, the dif-
ferent hosting choices require
the term cloud to be disam-
biguated and different porting
methods fully understood.
Physical and network proxim-
ity, multi-tenancy, and service
provider assumptions are some
of the key differences between
the cloud variants. Cloud choic-
es may differ based on busi-
ness and security needs and the
availability of the right technol-
ogy within the infrastructure to
allow a mapping of in-studio
media processes to the cloud.
For example, compute-intensive
media processes such as trans-
coding for distribution stream-
ing are ideal for any cloud vari-
ant since they require generic
compute capabilities available
in any cloud infrastructure.
As a downstream process in
the media production chain,
it doesn’t require specialized
interconnection with any studio
equipment, therefore the physi-
cal proximity of studio network
and servers is not as critical. On
the other hand, a multi-camera
and video mixer setup is ideal
for locally hosted servers due to
local interconnectivity require-
ments.
Along with infrastructure host-
ing choices, there are funda-
mentally two options for mov-
ing to the shared-resource and
elastic model of centralized data
centers and cloud. A ‘lift-and-
shift’ model ports existing soft-
ware services and applications
in their original form on virtual
machines that mimic bare-met-
al servers or workstations - pre-
serving decades of legacy tech-
nology and intellectual prop-
erty used within on-premise
infrastructure. Alternatively, a
microservices-based approach
involves refactoring existing
products into more atomic and
dynamically composable ser-
vices known as microservices.
The cloud-native implementa-
tion of small microservices pro-
vides scalability, cost-efficiency
and resiliency ideal for the elas-
tic and shared resource model
of cloud infrastructures.
Cloud deployment options
The first step towards a truly
shared on-premise infrastruc-
ture starts when different
departments share infrastruc-
ture running in common data
centers. Data center-based
operations, ubiquitous in the IT
industry, and are now becoming
commonplace for shared media
processing, with the data center
operated by the media enter-
prise or by a hosted service
provider.
While bare-metal servers run-
ning multi-tenant services are
standard in this environment,
virtual machines (VMs) can be
used with commonly available
hypervisors to achieve isolation
or on-demand elasticity. Bare-
Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com • 107