As a matter of fact, a Report from mashable.com indexes the World’s largest population as:
- China
- India
- Tencent
Conceivably, with the aforestated fact, we may deliver that 93% of the Shopper’s Buying Decisions are influenced by Social Media or may be not.
Media Technologies are the mass media that are intended to reach a large audience by mass communication.
The growing popularity of media sharing is creating scaling problems for site owners, who face ever-increasing storage and bandwidth requirements and increased go-to-market pressure to deliver faster than the competition.
The Major Challenges Faced
It also includes serious requirements for low latency, high availability, durability and access control. In addition, because of “spiky” usage patterns, operations teams often need to provision static hardware, network, and management resources to support the maximum expected need, which guarantees waste outside of peak hours.
This fast-changing industry and companies now rely a lot on the new age media channels to earn additional revenues from their content and keep their audiences engaged. To leverage this, we’ve lately seen a burning need by media companies for a cost effective automated workflow solution & have been working closely with some marquee media companies, to develop just this. This media workflow, a 4 Step Solution, automates Content Storage, Transcoding, Publishing on Syndicate Partner Platforms like Youtube, vimeo & even archival using AWS Cloud. You can try out this workflow free on AWS Testdrive.
Solution Architectures to the Rescue!
But, if you’re having challenges optimizing your media solution, AWS provides with two sample solution architectures – Content & Media Serving and Media Sharing. These are only reference designs and you can modify these based on your company’s requirements.
Sample Architecture
Content & Media serving involves services like Amazon EC2, Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3 for live streaming and to deliver high-performance media serving.
Amazon S3 is highly available, highly durable. It provides a great way to offload the work of serving static content from your web servers. Amazon CloudFront can provide substantial improvements in latency, fault tolerance, and cost.
Using Amazon EC2 could allow you a greater degree of control, logging, and feature richness in serving content. Route 53 is a Domain Name System (DNS) web service that connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS & to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS.
Media Sharing on the other hand involves content sharing such as uploading media files to online service and constituting a highly available, durable, and cost-effective processing platform. It entails services like Amazon EC2, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Route 53, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS and Amazon SQS.
In this architecture, Elastic Load Balancer distributes incoming network traffic to upload servers of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Amazon CloudWatch monitors these servers and Auto Scaling automatically scales EC2 capacity up or down based on load.
Uploaded files are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). To submit a new file to be processed, upload web servers push a message into an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue.
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is used to put media-related Data whereas Media Files are distributed from Amazon S3 to the end user via Amazon CloudFront.
Companies like FAIRFAX MEDIA, ATG MEDIA, ACCORDANT MEDIA, SHAW MEDIA, HI-MEDIA, COMCAST, SCORE MEDIA, ETC. have expressed that infrastructure costs have been reduced by using AWS. Amazon Cloud gives the ability to be agile and scale while keeping operational and capital costs low.
For those media houses who are Happy with their efficient Solution Architectures, here’s a bouncer for you guys. Say you have your entire media infrastructure in place with all your AWS Components, did you know, you can even store your S3, CloudFront & ELB Logs! How does that give you new insights into your business you ask? Well, we developed a product around it called Cloudlytics to Answer just that.
Got any Interesting Solution Architecture Tit-Bits we could snack on or even debate? Feel free to reach out to us or comment below!
