26 TECHFEED Cloud Microservices
CLOUD-NATIVE Microservices could just as easily be called ‘cloud-native software’ since they are specifically re-architected for life in the cloud. However, much of current cloud usage in the TV industry is what is dubbed ‘lift-and-shift’. This is when developers which previously married software with dedicated hardware simply port their existing software into a datacentre, without any software redesign. “There are crucial differences between how physical and virtual hardware systems operate,” says Bullett. “Software designed to sit on dedicated hardware systems will be constrained in what it can achieve in the cloud. This ‘lifted and shifted’ software simply can’t scale as efficiently as a ‘cloud- native’ solution. They lack the ability to tap into traditional cloud characteristics such as elastic scaling, geo-dispersion and advanced process automation.” “The best ways to write software for the cloud don’t necessarily change what the software is doing,” counters Shawn Carnahan CTO, Telestream. His company has spent the past 18 months taking the software it ships today and migrating it to a microservice, often using the exact same code. Imagine’s Zenium platform, according to
MICROSERVICES ARE REALLY ABOUT MAKING CHANGES INA CONTROLLEDANDNON-INVASIVE FASHION
Eksten, allows its customers and partners to create microservices on demand. “Our investment has been to develop a platform that allows us to develop at the nano-services scale, one that maximises the philosophy of microservices, while allowing us to maximise our return on R&D investment,” he says. “The next step, where the community will become more involved, is to establish a set of standards around how microservices interoperate at the network level. It’s something we need as a community to move the collective success of the industry forward.” The EBU, a coalition of Europe’s broadcasters, is working on this. The Media Cloud and Microservice Architecture (MCMA) builds on previous work in the FIMS (Framework for Interoperable Media Services) project and aims to develop a
set of APIs to combine microservices in the cloud with other in-house services and processes. MCMA will also share libraries containing “glue code” between these high- level APIs and low-level cloud platforms. SUPPLY CHAIN METHODOLOGY According to Simon Eldridge, chief product officer of SDVI Corporation, a provider of software as a service solutions, the real challenge is less about technology per se and more about an approach to business. “Traditionally, vendors have sold product with licences or in boxes and broadcasters are used to buying boxes and licensing software, then amortising the expense over time,” he says. “When you move to an operations model where you only pay for what you use, it seems difficult for some organisations to get
HOW TO MAKE THE MICROSERVICES SWITCH
The easiest way to get into microservices, at least according to Imagine, who provide a range of microservice- based options, is to just put the money down on a microservices-based solution. But the more cautious can explore microservices provided by a cloud vendor. For instance, if you wanted to try the automated captioning services from IBM or Microsoft, you can start by sending a few files into the services, and in turn, those cloud providers will provide back captions or captioned content. The most common way to start building a microservices-based infrastructure is to select parts of your existing
service/solution chains and start swapping out individual components for ones based on microservices. “That will provide you with a piece-wise method for stepping into microservices,” says Imagine’s Brick Eksten. “If, however, the customer wants to move to a more pure microservices architecture, there are many considerations to get from traditional rack/stack thinking to a process and plan based on microservices.” The first step is organisational. Eksten explains that a pure-
unit of functionality — what it is, what its requirements are, how it works, and ultimately how it will be deployed and managed. This doesn’t necessarily mean DevOps, but it does mean bringing together the right people. It takes a diverse team with a broad skillset to bring the right perspective and to ultimately be successful in moving to microservices. The second step is to set goals, starting with small pieces of the solution set. The third step is to begin building up the scope and complexity of the deployment. The last step is to tackle the more complex solution-sets like playout.
play microservices solution requires a
team to consider each service element, each microservice, as a logical
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