Design principles

In the cloud, there are a number of principles that can help you create and run streaming media workloads. Keep these in mind as we discuss best practices:

Keep a Glass-to-Glass Perspective — From camera to viewer device, always consider how change impacts the critical path of video delivery. For example, adding a transcoding component can increase live latency, reduce video quality, and introduce another point of failure in your workload. 

Understand Your Audience — Build a deep understanding of your audience to inform business and technical decision making. Use analytics to uncover the network conditions, devices, and displays that your audience uses to optimize for their unique consumption habits and prioritize playback testing. Make sense of interaction data and proactively engage with your audience through recommendations, personalization, and notifications. Analyze viewership data and forecast usage to validate the performance of all the components in the workflow at peak scale. 

Know your Content’s Value — Start your design with a shared understanding of the content value between stakeholders. This will help you make decisions and tradeoffs around overall costs, reliability objectives, performance, and content protection schemes.

Design for Disruption — While care should be taken to minimize failures, you should expect disruption. In designing for disruption, start with a shared reliability objective across the organization taking into account the content value. Aligned to your reliability objective, build redundancy into each component and the network links between them. Also, seek to understand the areas of concern between components and architect to gracefully handle failure or impairment of components.