How Microservices Benefit Broadcasters

Learn more about microservices at Streaming Media's next event.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Mark Myslinski: Now, if you can get to microservices, you can get to containers, you can get to that which is optimized through the internet and cloud topology and IP-based protocols. Now we can get away from the dedicated stuff. Now we can get to cloud topology. Now we have the expandability if we need that for volumes of processing or volumes of traffic or whatever. I see that as some big benefits and those applications become cloud-native, as opposed to just cloud-enabled. They can run on a cloud, a cloud-native. And the Googles and the Facebooks and the Amazons of the world, they grew up on this stuff, so they're already there. And if the broadcasters are gonna try to compete with them they've gotta get to this cloud-native kind of applications. I think that's one of the big benefits once they can get there, that they can truly compete with agility and scalability of the big guys that I just mentioned, but they're gonna need to do that.

Paul MacDougall: I think there's also some big advantages around, you know, the scalability. Quite frequently, you might get a new initiative that we need to put content on some other platform or something like that, and the time frame of that might be something where you have to scale up a lot of resources, especially if you do that with a monolithic architecture, you know, you have to scale up aspects of your application that aren't necessarily beneficial to that process. So, you might be able to take a more, old-school transcoder and put that on a VM and, you know, spin up a thousand VMs to do that. But quite likely, you're replicating services, you're replicating software and components and so forth that are using resources that aren't beneficial to, you know, that overall project. So, there's that efficiency loss. There's the ability to iterate, of course, new versions, testing out just the component that you need that new feature on. It's very powerful, especially with our market, you know, constantly releasing new HDR formats, new codecs, new, you know, all kinds of new bells and whistles all the time. And then the last one that I think is a big trend that we've seen a lot lately is the isolation of responsibilities between different departments. So something that some of the, especially larger broadcasters have done, they have the IT department that single responsibility becomes now just installing servers, even if they're not going the cloud-native route, they're going and just racking generic CPUs in some data center somewhere. And the fact that they can be abstracted from what software's running out of the considerations that might be unique to that software, because it's running on some sort of microservice, some sort of container architecture, means that they don't need to get into the nuances of what that application requires.