Building the Cloud Video You Want & Need

www.tagvs.com Introduction

As cloud services continue to mature and offer more robust features and capabilities, they become an increasingly compelling solution for hosting broadcasters’ video architecture.

They offer valuable services and can support better performance, greater agility in adapting to growth or change, and cost savings in the long run.

While the benefits of making the shift to cloud-based video architecture can be tremendous, you can realize those benefits much more quickly and painlessly if you undertake the project with an understanding of key steps and potential pitfalls along the way.

This guide presents seven tips from engineers who have already navigated this path. Their insights can help you make the journey with less frustration and help you build a cloud video architecture that meets both your technical requirements and your budgetary limitations.

While some of these suggestions may incur higher costs at the outset, all of them can save you aggravation, time, and money in the long term. www.tagvs.com Tip #1 R

Get Your Own Expertise

Of the costs you might incur at the start of this project, the expense of acquiring your own IT and cloud engineers likely will be most significant — and essential. The expertise of IT and cloud engineers will help you along the way, saving you time and money as you move to a cloud-based video architecture.

Having one or more dedicated IT/cloud experts on your team will be extremely valuable as you plan out your move to the cloud. Perhaps even more important, ready access to this expert resource will give you the means to quickly address problems and adapt to changing requirements as you go live and move into normal operations.

www.tagvs.com Tip #2 R

Spend Time on Your Topology/Architecture

You know what has worked best for your streaming flow and your system. Consider how to fit in the cloud service into that topology. Try other variations of your topology. Seek advice from experts.

Then, build your ecosystem and topology as well as you can, considering every network- and video-related element from the source itself to the end client. If you plan the points of integration going into and out of the cloud in advance, then you are much more likely to see potential problems with the architecture before you move to the cloud.

www.tagvs.com Tip #3 R

Map Out Your Stream Flow

Think about different kinds of streams and the codecs you’re going to use. Consider bitrate, transcoding, and any other factor that might come into . Be aware that you’ll face some limitations in deploying video over the cloud — and that the stream flow will not behave the same way in the cloud that it does on-premises.

Get the advice of experts, including your IT and cloud engineers if they know their way around video. your stream flow from end to end, from your studios through the cloud and CDNs and up to the end user. Then be prepared to test!

www.tagvs.com Tip #4 R

Keep Your Focus on Your Network

Network is everything — the hub of your cloud video architecture. A stable, secure, reliable network will give you a good streaming flow. An unstable and unreliable network can be a massive point of failure during a live production. Unlike on-site network configuration, where it takes days and weeks to deal with all of the routers, switchers, and network-related devices, the configuration of your network in the cloud takes just a few clicks.

As you plan your own private network — VPC on AWS, VNet on Azure, and so on — you can create a secure area with the of redundancy you need. Be sure you create configuration backups on every system, so that you’re prepared if one fails, shuts down, or reboots unexpectedly.

www.tagvs.com Tip #5 R

Take Advantage of Enhancement and Monitoring

Rather than take the default network that your cloud provider gives you, use some network enhancement to be sure your network remains stable over time. The console for your cloud environment will offer numerous monitoring tools. Use them! You’ll get a better idea of the network’s real-time performance, and you can define alerts and use logs to improve the efficiency of monitoring overall.

www.tagvs.com Tip #6 R

Test, Test, Test

As all broadcasters know, things can go wrong — even for a system that has been working perfectly — when you go live. Test your network flow at every to prevent issues from snowballing and getting out of control. Test as long as you must to ensure you have stable and reliable streams from end to end, with no packet loss, and that your network is robust.

Design and test your stream flow throughout your framework inside the cloud. Look at the traffic between regions, the traffic between different cloud providers if you have a backup system on another cloud provider, and traffic from the cloud to the CDN.

www.tagvs.com Tip #7 R

Optimize for Your Budget

You’ll find many ways to tweak and better your performance budget-wise on the cloud.

All major cloud service providers offer hundreds of different types of instances with differing GPU and CPU performance, optimization for memory and storage, and so on. Determine what you want and need, and then identify the best mix of instance type and confirm that it is supported by the providers of your cloud services.

Knowing the instance type you want, along with the region and uptime (and their availability/cost), calculate your costs — and make sure they don’t exceed those of a physical server. Over time, you will be able to adjust your system and instance to better align with your needs, or even automate systems to go up and down along with your typical usage. Application 1 Application 2 Application 3 Summary

Moving to video architecture in the cloud is no small task, but with plenty of planning and testing — plus robust monitoring once you’re live — you will be positioned to take advantage of its many benefits. In addition to optimizing Ilan Torbaty your use of the cloud and containing VP Global Tech Operations costs, you’ll be prepared to leverage the cloud for further growth or expansion of your services. Ready to get started? Apply for a FREE TAG TRIAL today.

Golan Simani Click Here Tech Operations Lead

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