Albert Cheng, COO Amazon Studios, and Callum Hughes, Senior Solutions Architect' s presentation to the Media Supply Chain's track at the Media & Entertainment Cloud Symposium on November 4, 2016

1. Amazon Studios:
Clouds and Dams
Albert Cheng – Chief Operating Officer
Callum Hughes – Senior Solutions Architect
November 4th, 2016

2. Agenda
• Introduction: Framing the challenge
• The plan: always evolving
• The execution
• Unexpected hiccups
• The “Richard Dean Anderson” approach
• The future

3. Introduction: Framing the challenge
• As a new Studio, there was limited supporting infrastructure
• Third party solutions were being used to support traditional approaches
• Requirements for improved systems coming in
• Marketing
• PR
• Legal
• Post Production
• Delivery
• External factors also necessitated rapid adoption of new solutions
• Huge growth of Original TV and Movie Content
• Addition of international markets and growth

4. The plan: always evolving
• Divide and Conquer: assess what was needed, determine approach
• Set timelines: “phase one should take 8 weeks”
• Post Production Workflows were prioritized
• Digital Asset Management (DAM) was determined to be the priority
• Understanding what that meant was crucial to phase one
• Assessing workflows
• Who needed access and why
• Looking at assets themselves
• How big, how many, and what was needed (thousands, hundreds of GB for UHD)
• Metadata: understanding what we had and labeling it

5. The execution
• Divide and Conquer
• There were too many inputs and outputs to hit all at once
• Existing processes were working, so we looked at archives first
• Content was all on LTOs off-site (non-Amazon) and was expensive to store
• We began to ”fill the lake” with this content
• AWS Snowball was used to move up to 80TB at a time into AWS S3
• This took a longer time than anticipated
• Mechanical tape devices fail: restores were slowed down
• Early Snowballs (BETA) threw up errors with special characters
• We had to work with AWS to get a patch
Once the content was in S3, we needed to figure out what to do with it!

6. The execution
• Enabling additional workflows
• Once Archiving was underway, we needed to grow the project scope
• Archived material was only one aspect
• We needed to develop more workflows to ensure scalability and speed
• Ingestion assets from third parties
• Being able to receive assets from all over the World
• Pushing assets to other parties
• The assets were all added to the “lake”
• The DAM began to grow taller
• Additional AWS services were added
• Snowball was just the first
• EC2 and VPC quickly followed
• Direct Connect facilitated connectivity and reduced delivery times

7. The execution
• AWS provided the building blocks
• We were able to procure infrastructure in minutes
• Security was of paramount concern
• Encryption at all stages
• Bastion hosts
• No internet connectivity
• Standard AWS Best Practices augment internal InfoSec Policies
• Levels Beyond “Reach Engine” implemented
• Custom install
• First ever 100% Cloud Deployment
• Encoding provided by Elemental Technologies

8. Unexpected hiccups
• Archiving to AWS took longer than expected
• Mechanical Tape failures
• Bugs within AWS Snowball (BETA) devices (all fixed now!)
• Elemental Technology
• S3 encoding snag for UHD
• 200Gb file size limit
• Caused by 20Mb chunk size, 10,000 chunk limit = 200Gb
• Required an “on the fly” solution
• Metadata definitions
• What to label assets with
• Has to be agreed and uniform with your customer

9. The Richard Dean Anderson approach
Or “how to think like MacGuyver”
• Your “plan” must adapt and evolve
• Things can and will go wrong
• Elemental file size issue: three stage adaptive approach
• Bugs within AWS Snowball devices: plan in additional time
• Your metadata may need to change:
• Make sure your solution is flexible enough to adjust
• AWS provides enough tools to rival a Leatherman
AWS now powers our DAM 100%

10. What’s it look like?

11. The Future
The DAM is the first stage of our growth as a modern studio
• To ensure appropriate solutions, tenets have been defined
• Technology is a solution, not the reason to do something
• Security is paramount
• Scalability has to be natural
• Users have to enjoy using the solution
• Something has to be shown to work in practice, not just in principle
“Cloud City” is taking shape and will provide for as many Studio needs as
possible

12. Q & A