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TECHFEED Cloud Microservices
their heads around it. Once they do, they immediately see the benefit in only paying for the services they require.” Eldridge adds: “Essentially, in a real microservice environment the end user gets to pick and choose the providers of each service from the best of breed vendors, and plug them together in a way that lets them construct their own solution, not simply turn things on and off from a single vendor that are just software options on a monolithic application.” Carnahan agrees, suggesting broadcasters need to shift mindsets further towards trusting in software as a service. “The client doesn’t know what machine the software is actually running on. There’s no sense of permanence. The software only lives long enough to do the workload that it is cast to do and then goes away. That is a different concept from shipping software that runs 24/7 but is chewing up power all day long while the customer is paying off the lease it used to buy the gear in the first place.” It’s becoming more and more common for media companies to consider what they do in the context of a supply chain – essentially receiving raw material (the content), then processing, assembling and packaging it
for distribution to consumers, much like any manufacturing facility. But customers need to get their heads around the loss of control that comes with moving to software as a service. “They need to adapt to a supply chain methodology which asks how much does it cost to produce and deliver a show, rather than how much will it cost me to buy gear,” suggests Carnahan. “And instead of dealing in thousands of pounds of capital investment the answer will be in fractions of a penny per minute.” Vendors, he says, can take care of solving that equation by providing it as a service delivering on the desired outcome – whether quality, turnaround, reliability. “Vendors are providing the infrastructure that sits indirectly on top of a public cloud but its margins have to be sufficient to sustain the business. In the end, the customer is probably paying more for software as a service than if they had capitalised the hardware and software themselves but the trade-off is that they don’t carry that CAPEX and they have far more options to change their business.”
The classic example is being able to spin up a channel in days if not hours and if it doesn’t work, simply turn it off without ongoing costs. DON’T WRITE OFF HARDWARE Can microservices solve all problems? Well, no, as microservices are fundamentally a software solution to problems that may be better solved in hardware. For example, Imagine Communications’ Selenio Network Processor is an FPGA- based, low-latency 1RU solution that can handle simultaneous processing of up to 32 HD streams or eight UHD streams. Can you perform the same functionality in microservices? “Absolutely, but the cost would be prohibitive,” says Eksten. “The benefit of moving to a COTS architecture is based partially on Moore’s Law: as compute power goes up, costs come down. We are at the point where it is now financially and physically efficient to perform many, if not most, broadcast functions in software as microservices – but not every function.” The move to microservices doesn’t have to happen overnight, but it does have a ‘best-by’ date associated with when giant players like Amazon and Google will overwhelm any pay TV or broadcast competition. You are already seeing the effects of this chess match being played out by the M&E giants and the IT market leaders. At some point, it will become a relevant discussion for the rest of the market. It’s not a question of ‘if,’ but a question of ‘when’.
THE NEXT STEP, WHERE THE COMMUNITYWILL BECOME MORE INVOLVED, IS TO ESTABLISHA SET OF STANDARDS AROUNDHOWMICROSERVICES INTEROPERATE AT THE NETWORK LEVEL
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