Best practices - Streaming Media Lens

Best practices

There are four best practice areas for reliability in the cloud:

  • Foundations

  • Workload architecture

  • Change management

  • Failure management

The probability of workload failure increases as the number of components in your system increases. Media industry people generally agree with AWS CTO Werner Vogels’ often-quoted statement that “Failures are a given and everything will eventually fail over time.... This is a given, whether you are using the highest-quality hardware or lowest cost components”, thus we build our workloads to operate despite single points of failure. Your objective is to maintain the viewing experience when failure or degradation does occur. As we’ve seen from the scenarios, the delivery of high-quality streaming media requires a considerable amount of complexity that often crosses business stakeholders. Keep a glass-to-glass perspective, from content production to delivery, and consider how any single component failure could impact the quality of playback experience.

In this section, we provide best practices that you can use to evaluate and improve the reliability of your streaming media services.