Tedial CTO Julian Fernandez-Campon delves into the term cloud-native and what it means for broadcasters and content owners
Posted: October 12, 2022
Attending IBC 2022, it’s clear to see how far the media industry has shifted to cloud-based content management. It’s also clear that there aren’t two cloud deployments, which have become must-haves for every software vendor in one way or another, and it’s worth noting that almost all of them claim to be cloud-native. . But what does cloud-native actually mean? According GitLab, one of the largest development platforms, “Cloud-native is a term used to describe applications designed to run in a cloud computing environment. These applications are designed to be scalable, highly available, and easy to manage.
In contrast, traditional applications that are not cloud-native are often deployed in the cloud on virtual machines and therefore do not take full advantage of the benefits of the cloud. Between these two positions, there is a wide range of grayscale applications that claim to be cloud-native because they are in the cloud and containerized, but also do not take full advantage of the benefits.
The M&E industry has challenges that must be addressed to ensure a true cloud-native solution.
Take advantage of the cloud
Cloud services have many benefits: fast time to market, elasticity, accessibility, security to name the most relevant, but for a platform to deliver all of these benefits, applications must be architected and deployed. with a cloud-based mindset that can be summed up as follows:
- Use of containers
- Cost-effectiveness, using, where possible, cloud services (database, indexing/search, storage) to maximize return on investment
- Elasticity, to be able to scale up and down according to processing needs
- Visibility, to give customers all the metrics to be able to optimize the operation according to business needs. Sometimes using less resources is enough and there is no need to spend money to increase the speed
- Simple and scalable upgrades and upgrades to meet future needs
Most software in the cloud is containerized, but not all meet all of these requirements, especially in the M&E industry.
The Cloud in the M&E Industry: Building the Content Supply Chain
The M&E industry has specific requirements that make cloud operation more complex, especially when building the content supply chain. The first is media management, all applications need to access media efficiently. The second is the integration of all applications as part of the ecosystem to be able to implement the content supply chain. These two requirements make cloud-native for media even more difficult than with other services such as email, mobile apps or any other that we consume on a daily basis. This is especially true with integrations, as software that is containerized needs to be decoupled from plugins. Otherwise, microservices will become monsters with lots of plugins inside and every small upgrade in an integration will also force the microservice to be upgraded, with the risk that entails.
Also, the interfaces of all plugins must be unified because if not, a change in an interface, even if it is decoupled as a plugin, will also force the upgrade of the micro service, and of even for metadata that is sent and received as part of the integration.
The business processes used to implement the content supply chain should also be decoupled as packages and be easy to define, maintain, and upgrade.
That’s why having a true media integration platform that abstracts the interface and data model is essential to having a true “cloud-native media” deployment.
Time-tested
Broadcasters want solutions that work now and are flexible enough to evolve and adapt to future needs. Taking media cloud deployments to the next level means upgrades are easy, low risk, can be done automatically or by non-technical people, and of course, vendor independent. Therefore, cloud-native applications for media must implement a true CI/CD process not only for the software, but also for all integration plugins and workflows.
This should be achieved by defining a repository where all microservices, plugins and workflows are delivered and deployments are upgraded with only the elements they need, minimizing risk, ensuring business continuity, maximizing return on investment and minimizing the total cost of ownership because there is no dependency on the seller.
Tedial’s smartWork NoCode cloud native media integration platform is built with microservices and kubernetes to provide future scalability and scalability, both media operations and resources.
