16 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE AWS
MAGNIFICENT MENTORING Krystal Mejia of CBS Interactive has always seen Nagata as a mentor, reaching out to her every time she needed advice
SN: I also remember you and Flavio would be working on different portions of the code – you would be checking things in and out of GitHub and then performing reviews on each other ’s code. And you were able to roll back faster or make changes. KM: There’s a lot of overlap when you think of the projects my team works on – one is in the live environment and one is in the VOD environment, so we need to collaborate and communicate with each other quickly. We’re all on the same team, but we’re all hyper-focused on our own code base. With the cloud, you have GitHub or Version Control, which allows you to collaborate more quickly. SN: I also liked how you guys releveraged your video solutions across different business units within CBS Interactive, because we weren’t just working on the Super Bowl. KM: It’s great to be able to collaborate and learn from each other. Sharing our experiences and learning from our failures is what makes us successful. SN: The other thing to note is that all of us were working remotely from many locations. CBS used online meeting tools, such as Zoom, which enabled us to feel like we were working together in the same room, when in reality we spent very little time physically together until the live event. How was it doing that much live remote collaboration? SN: We use similar tools at AWS, but with CBS Interactive, Krystal, Flavio and I conducted open mic working sessions that enabled us to work on our individual tasks and perform testing while having the ability to pop-up and raise questions as I LEARNED YOU CANNOT DO EVERYTHING YOURSELF. YOU NEED TO IDENTIFY EACH TEAM MEMBER’S TALENT
SN: It is easier for teams to experiment with new technologies in minutes instead of days or weeks. For example, we’re able to try new things and figure out quickly what works and what doesn’t. We’re able to fail faster, so that we learn from mistakes and create better solutions. KM: It allows for all the experimenting that we do. We’re able to finalise how we see our infrastructure being built and deployed in the cloud. My day-to-day is a lot of collaborating with different divisions within CBS Interactive to get us out of the data centre. The data centre is hard to manage. It’s easier to run containers in the cloud. SN: It’s also easier to share and work collaboratively in the cloud, especially if you’re using a DevOps type of mentality. Can you tell us about using DevOps in the broadcast world? KM: We actually have to architect our own systems and how we’re going to distribute them in the cloud. I’ve been forced to be my own DevOps engineer. When I was in college, I never thought DevOps was something I would be doing, but it’s exciting to understand how you’re containerising and distributing your systems.
The Super Bowl 2019 project was such a collaborative process, where we worked hand-in-hand with the broadcast team for the OTT delivery of the broadcast. I see a lot of that moving forward now, with more collaboration in that environment. How are cloud technologies changing what you do? KM: I’ve been working in the cloud since I started. Cloud forces me to think of my infrastructure as code. It takes my focus from being solely on the application layer. The flexibility and scaleability that you get with the cloud makes so much sense for anything I do. And it doesn’t have to be just media technology. I’m constantly writing code using container services. SN: When you have infrastructure as a code, you’re not tied to specific machines or set-ups. It’s easier to be able to replace those items when they break. And if you want a third or fourth or fifth, or you want to move it to a different region, it’s easier to do that in the cloud. KM: And you can scale on demand most of the time and pay only for what you are using. How does working in the cloud change how teams collaborate?
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