How MediaLive Anywhere works

An AWS Elemental MediaLive Anywhere deployment involves several components:

• Networks in your organization. These networks are represented by the bright blue boxes in the diagram that follows.

• Clusters (blue boxes), which group channel placement groups, nodes, and channels.

• Nodes (green boxes), which represent the node hardware. Typically, your deployment includes enough nodes to handle the peak channel load, plus some backup nodes for node resiliency.

• Channel placement groups (yellow boxes), which group channels.

• Channels (orange boxes), which are the MediaLive channels running specifically on MediaLive Anywhere nodes.

A cluster is a collection of nodes. The cluster is associated with one or more networks.

Within each cluster, there are nodes, channel placement groups, and channels.

Provisioning a MediaLive Anywhere cluster

When you provision the MediaLive Anywhere, you set up the following connections:

• The cluster contains one or more nodes (green boxes). In one cluster, all the nodes have identical processing capabilities and identical network interfaces and SDI interfaces. The nodes belong to the one cluster.

• A channel placement group (yellow box) is a collection of channels. The channels belong to the channel placement group.

• You attach a channel placement group to a node. When the cluster is in production, the video engineer creates channels (orange boxes) and attaches each to a specific channel placement group.

  The nodes are all interchangeable. Any node can encode the channels in any channel placement group in the cluster.

  The channel placement group plays an important role in node failover. When a node fails, MediaLive Anywhere automatically fails over and restarts all the channels in the channel placement group on a backup node.

MediaLive Anywhere at run time

When the MediaLive video engineer designs a channel, they specify the cluster for the channel, and the channel placement group within the cluster. The video engineer chooses the cluster and channel placement group carefully. This is not an ad-hoc decision.

When the MediaLive operator runs the first channel in a channel placement group, MediaLive chooses a free node in the cluster to run the channel on. After that, whenever another channel in the channel placement group starts, it always runs on that node.

All the channels in one channel placement group stay together. If a node fails, MediaLive automatically fails over and restarts all the channels in the channel placement group on another node (a free node) in the cluster.