NAB
Anyone involved in technology migration projects will
probably tell you that it’s much easier building systems from scratch than
incrementally migrating existing workflows to new systems. But the reality is
different. Because a return needs to be made on past investments, or because
entirely-new workflows will cause too much operational disruption, hybrid
workflows will be important for several years, allowing every company to
transition to the cloud at their own pace.
https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/big-bang-or-um-incremental-bang-lessons-in-cloud-migration/
A hybrid scenario implies that the media lives, and is
processed, both on-prem and in the cloud. In some situations, hybrid operations
will be required regardless as it may be more cost effective to work on-prem
before assets are moved to the cloud.
Before embarking on migration, CTOs and broadcaster
engineering/IT teams should be aware of the advantages and limitations that
come with working on the cloud. Lessons learnt should be used to optimize
workflow.
A panel convened by Streaming Media provides some
perspective from executives who have made the move and come out the other side.
The panelists are Gerry Field, VP of technology and
distribution services at American Public Television (APT); Renard T. Jenkins,
VP of content transmission and production technology at WarnerMedia; Richard
Oesterreicher, president and CEO of Streaming Global; and Shiva Paranandi, VP
of technology operations and cloud architecture at Paramount+.
Each of them is looking in the rearview mirror, at least to
some degree, and each make the transition to the cloud sound easy, when of
course it’s anything but. However, they all declare the move a success in that
they are consistently able to scale and run their environments in the cloud.
Read a summary of the discussion at Streaming Media,
and watch the full panel in the video below:
This summer, most of the non-live and near-live programming
that APT distributes will be moved to the cloud and will no longer be fed on
satellite. Among other things, this will eliminate redundant recording and
storage across its 356 stations.
Nonetheless said Field: “We are very clearly in a hybrid
workflow environment, and we are going to remain that way. There are some
things that just don’t make sense for us to do in the cloud. Our [quality
control] is still very much an on-prem process. If we had to pay for that, it
would add considerably to the cloud bills that we’re paying.”
ViacomCBS, Paramount+’s parent company, has taken the first
of two steps on its cloud journey. The entire streaming business, Paramount+,
and some CBS news and sports properties have already been delivered to the
cloud. This was roughly a three-year transition, including a time when the
company was running its on-prem and cloud services in tandem as it moved fully
to the cloud.
“That intermediate state, when you’re migrating from the
data center to the cloud, is extremely important because you’ve got to keep
both systems running,” said Paranandi. “That’s double the effort, so you have
to make sure there’s enough automation and processes so you don’t double your
staff, but you still can keep all your uptime going.”
Jenkins also advised a phased approach: “Look for the
low-hanging fruit to find those things that you can easily move to the cloud.
One of the first things that people think about is your archive, especially if
you have an archive, a ‘near-chive,’ and a deep archive. You move the archive
first to your ‘near-chive,’ and you make copies and you keep it local so that
you can continue to work.”
Latency issues continue to be a problem which is why
Paramount+ is edge-caching of a lot of its VOD content. “It helps reduce the
latency in the cloud quite a bit,” reports Paranandi. “When it comes to live
streaming, there’s a lot of the network backbone that we have to pay attention
to. Where the content is sourced from and how it is distributed is pretty
relevant.”
An advantage on the pro-cloud side is the ability to turn
things on and scale quickly. The cons? Learning new skill sets and work
approaches, dealing with security, and anticipating costs when almost every
aspect of the workflow starts a meter running.
Rather than hiring in entirely new personnel with the
requisite software programming and data analytics skills, Jenkins prefers to
train up existing staff.
“If someone is willing to learn, and they have historical
knowledge, that’s going to be a really valuable player for you,” he said.
A fundamental learning is to ensure that processes that are
ramped up for one event are spun down again at the end. Only that way will you
optimize the pay as go OPEX of cloud.
“You find out that a process has been running constantly in
the background,” Jenkins said. “It’s something as simple as that, that you have
to really get people to focus on and that makes a very big difference because
it’s not set and forget, like we do with a lot of traditional broadcasts.”
And one important lesson is that sometimes, old school is
best. “Some of the efficiencies that you get from broadcasting content are just
really hard to beat,” said Field. APT provides content for public television
stations, and while last-mile delivery is being done primarily over broadcast
transmitters, that transmitter output is also being fed to a streaming service.
“The content that we distribute eventually winds up on
transmitters. It’s a question of how it’s getting there.”
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