Broadcast Beat Magazine 2018 NAB Show Edition | Page 109
Bare metal, VMs and
container comparisons
viding resource isolation at a
more granular level than VMs.
With VMs emulating bare-met-
al OS and machine functions,
applications and services can
run with almost no chang-
es – hence the lift-and-shift
approach. While the application
may be portable, special atten-
tion to mapping to specialized
human interface devices, con-
trollers and media-specific I/O
connectivity devices, are criti-
cal in this virtual environment.
Containers can be used for
large monolithic applications
without refactoring but are
most effective when associated
with microservices, as they’re
built for lightweight and rapidly
deployable uses.
Decisions on which media-relat-
ed processes to port to VMs and
which to container are based on
a range of factors:
• ability to refactor existing
application and services
into smaller microservices
• ability of the original service
to cleanly startup and shut
down
• availability of virtualized
access to specialized hard-
ware the service requires
• impact on performance
• uptime assumptions
• infrastructure availability to
allow for dynamic scalability
Generally, unless dedicated
hardware is involved, nearly all
post-production processes port
easily to VMs. Existing products
should be evaluated for refac-
toring using the criteria above.
Of course, any new functional-
ity should ideally be built as
composable atomic microser-
vices if a platform is available to
execute them.
Easily transitioning existing
media processes to the cloud
is determined by choosing the
right infrastructure hosting
model, the right virtualization
method, and a smartly designed
software platform to make it all
work smoothly together. For
media production companies,
with enough technology choic-
es now available, the cloud is
finally here.
Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com • 109