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Thursday, February 23, 2017

BBC Internet Blog - Balancing, spikes & speed: Architecting media distribution cloud services

BBC Blogs - Internet Blog - Balancing, spikes & speed: Architecting media distribution cloud services: "In the Media Distribution team, our main systems are content caching servers, known as caching cells, that make up the BIDI Content Distribution Network (CDN). For these systems, we still rely heavily on physical machine deployments to meet our performance requirements. The caching cells also need to be deployed in certain geographical locations, meaning that a cloud based architecture restricted to Amazon’s data centres wouldn’t work, even if the performance were good enough.

Not all of our services in BIDI have to be deployed like that, however. The “brain” of the platform, which deals with traffic management and configuration, is a suite of micro services which aren’t tied to any particular data centre. For these services, AWS/Cosmos promises faster deployments and less operational overhead than our internal deployment platforms. It’s often cheaper in the end as well, even though AWS’ fine-grained pricing model makes it hard to quickly determine whether that’s going to be the case.

 One of the BIDI related services that we decided to deploy in the cloud is called Croupier and is used when making decisions about which CDN to redirect BBC iPlayer clients to. Croupier is a lookup service which provides an HTTP GET endpoint where the iPlayer client’s IP is a parameter. The service is internal: it is only used by another (AWS based) BBC service called Media Selector, which is called by iPlayer before the user actually gets to see any video." 'via Blog this'

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