Immersive media content such as 360 degree video places a unique set of demands on cloud-based infrastructure from a complete end to end solution point of view. A key goal for any solution of this nature is to keep costs low while not impacting availability, scale and compute performance. In this talk we will look at how to solve ingest, processing, storage and delivery of live and on-demand content for immersive media delivery, and present a reference design for 360 degree streaming using best-practice architectural patterns. Speakers: Konstantin Wilms, Principal Solutions Architect M&E, AWS and Chad Schmutzer, Specialist Solutions Architect SPOT, AWS

2. Building Highly Scalable Immersive
Media Solutions on AWS
Konstantin Wilms & Chad Schmutzer
Amazon Web Services

3. INTRODUCTION
Immersive Media in the Cloud

4. Origination Delivery
MULTI-CAMERA MEZ, LIVE
OR VOD CONTENT
B2C PLAYBACK TO CONSUMER
OR B2B DELIVERY
Encoding
CDN
Devices
Cost
Most of these can be tackled by utilizing media encoding and transport standards along
with best practice cloud design patterns for low latency, elastic, highly available infrastructure
Immersive Media Challenges

5. AWS
Marketplace
Amazon
Elastic Transcoder
Elemental
Technologies
AMI Model
Licensed S/W
Minimal Disruption
Proxies
Fast Integration
UGC & Prosumer
On-Prem & Cloud
Live, VOD, JIT
Professional
DIY BYO
PaaS / SaaS
BYOL
Self Contained
Custom Solutions
Media Processing on AWS

6. VOD
Workflow
G2
Distribution B2C
(Viewers)
Live
Workflow
G2
Archive
Source
Encoder
B2B
(Organizations)
A Cloud-Native Immersive Media Solution
 360 Live & VOD Pipeline
 Infrastructure as Code
 Optimized Service
Consumption
 Lowest Possible Cost
 Cloud Native Patterns
 100% Open Source
 Designed for Growth
 Reference Architecture

7. 16 Regions – 42 Availability Zones – 68 Edge Locations Region & Number of Availability Zones
AWS GovCloud (2) EU
Ireland (3)
US West Frankfurt (2)
Oregon (3) London (2)
Northern California (3)
Asia Pacific
US East Singapore (2)
N. Virginia (5), Ohio (3) Sydney (2), Tokyo (3),
Seoul (2), Mumbai (2)
Canada
Central (2) China
Beijing (2)
South America
São Paulo (3)
…with Global Deployment Capability
Announced Regions
Paris, Ningxia

8. So where do we start?

9. BUILDING A PIPELINE
Mapping Services & Partners to an End to End Workflow

10. Ingest Store Transform Process
PUSH OR PULL
MEZ, LIVE & VOD
CREATE A CENTRALIZED
CONTENT LAKE ON S3
MEDIA DELIVERY AND/OR
HANDS-ON POSTPRODUCTION
SCALE OUT ON ELASTIC
CAPACITY FOR ALL PROCESSING

11. Ingest
PUSH OR PULL
MEZ, LIVE & VOD
AWS Services
 AWS Direct Connect: For high bandwidth, deterministic live media
 Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration: Remote location ingest
 AWS Snowball: Petabyte scale data transfer (in and out)
 Amazon Cloudfront: Global content delivery network
 Elemental Appliances: On-prem video encode/prep for ingest
Partners
Media Ingest

12. AWS Services
 Amazon S3: Highly scalable, durable object storage
 Amazon Glacier: Secure, durable, petabyte-scale data archival
 Amazon EFS: Simple, elastic, scalable file system
 Amazon EBS: Persistent block storage
 AWS Marketplace: Partner solutions for storage (on/off-prem)
Partners
Store
CREATE A CENTRALIZED
CONTENT LAKE ON S3
Asset Storage

13. Transform
MEDIA DELIVERY AND/OR
HANDS-ON POSTPRODUCTION
AWS Services
 Amazon EC2: Scalable CPU/GPU computing capacity
 Amazon Workspaces: GPU accelerated desktops in the cloud
 AWS Marketplace: Partner solutions for storage (on/off-prem)
 Amazon Appstream: Run existing Windows Applications in the cloud
Partners
Content Transformation

14. Process
SCALE OUT ON ELASTIC
CAPACITY FOR ALL PROCESSING
AWS Services
 Amazon EC2 Spot: Low Cost spare GPU/CPU capacity at high scale
 AWS Batch: Fully managed batch processing at any scale
 Amazon ECS: High scale, high performance container management
 ThinkBox Deadline: Hassle-free scheduling for rendering & compute
 Elemental Cloud: On-demand, scalable video processing
Partners
Elastic Processing

15. What if we maximized EC2 Spot usage
…across the entire pipeline
VOD
Workflow
G2
Distribution B2C
(Viewers)
Live
Workflow
G2
Archive
Source
Encoder
B2B
(Organizations)

16. EC2 SPOT
Compute Capacity at Scale

17. On-Demand
Pay for compute
capacity by the hour
with no long-term
commitments
For spiky workloads,
or to define needs
AWS EC2 Consumption Models
Reserved
Make a low, one-time
payment and receive a
significant discount on
the hourly charge
For committed
utilization
Spot
Bid for unused capacity,
charged at a Spot Price
which fluctuates based
on supply and demand
For time-insensitive,
transient, or stateless
workloads

18. Spare Capacity at Scale
• AWS has more than a
million active customers
in 190 countries.
• Amazon EC2 instance
usage has increased 93%
YoY, comparing Q4 2014
and Q4 2013, not
including Amazon use.

19. EC2 Spot instances are
spare EC2 On-Demand capacity
with very simple rules…
What are EC2 Spot Instances?

20. Markets where the price of compute
changes based on supply and demand
You’ll never pay more than your bid.
When the market exceeds your bid you
get 2 minutes to wrap up your work
The Very Simple Rules of Spot

21.  Since Spot instances typically cost 50-90%
less than On-Demand, you can increase
your compute capacity by 2-10x within
the same budget
 Or you could save 50-90% on your
existing workload
 Either way, you should try it!
Get the Best Value for EC2 Capacity

22. AZ1
AZ2
Frankfurt Total Capacity
P2 C4 M4 I2 R4 D2
Shared
Dedicated
Shared
Dedicated
Understanding EC2 Capacity

23. $0.27 $0.29$0.50
2b 2cc2a
8XL
$0.30 $0.16$0.214XL
$0.07 $0.08$0.082XL
$0.05 $0.04$0.04XL
$0.01 $0.04$0.01L
C4
$1.76
On
Demand
$0.88
$0.44
$.22
$0.11
Each Instance Family
Each Instance Size
Each Availability Zone
In every Region
Is a separate Spot Market
Capacity & Spot Markets Recap

24. Bid Price vs. Market Price
50% Bid
75% Bid
You pay the
market price
25% Bid

25. Fault toleranceStateless Multi-AZ Loosely coupled
Instance
Flexibility
EC2 Spot Best Practices

26. ~ 21% less than 1 hour
~ 35% less than 2 hours
~ 40% less than 3 hours
In total roughly 50% of all instances live
less than 6 hours
My Instances Cannot be Interrupted!

27. Using a single additional
parameter
Run continuously for
up to 6 hours
Save up to 50% off On-
Demand pricing
$1
EC2 Spot Blocks

28.  Requested 1000
vCores over 30 days
 Minimum 960 vCores
Mode 1024 vCores
Average 1012 vCores
 Average Price of $0.012
per vCore
0
0.05
0.1
0.15
0.2
0.25
0.3
0.35
0.4
0.45
0.5
250
350
450
550
650
750
850
950
1050
1150
Number of Cores Running Average Hourly Price Per Core  Savings of over 80%
Batch Processing with EC2 Spot

29. DESIGN
Media Protocols, Transports & Cloud Architecture Patterns

30. Source
Playout
http://bit.ly/2fRnwvv
 Secure Compute/Rest/In-Flight (SSM)
 Live & On-Demand (live recordings to VOD)
 RTMP live ingest (RTP-FEC optimal, i.e. 2022)
 Ingest – bitrate conform & pre-stitching
 4k, AVCI, HEVC, H264/AAC – HLS + DASH
 ‘Internet’ / Direct Connect Ingest
 EC2 Spot for transcode (& proxies!) using
dynamic CPU/GPU FFMPEG on NGINX
 ECS - Docker to abstract dependencies
 ForgeJS DASH, Clappr HTML5, Unity Mobile
 Origin-Based remap using FFMPEG (PGM) &
Facebook transform filters
End to End Media Requirements

31.  Infrastructure as Code – Error-Free Repeatability (Cloudformation)
 Event-Based Pipelines – NGINX & S3 bucket events (nVOD)
 Circuit Breaker Pattern – Proactively Drain ALBs (Spot)
 Origin Proxy Pattern - Edge@Origin (fan out processing)
 Service Discovery – via EC2 Instance Tagging, DNS
 Bootstrap / Container Pattern – immutable infrastructure
 Multi Server Pattern – Multi-AZ (automatically consume all AZs)
 Decoupling Pattern – asynchronous & resilient (SQS, SNS)
Cloud Architecture Patterns

32. SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE
Live & nVOD Immersive Media Delivery

33. Backup Origin
Primary Origin
G2
G2
Ingest
Bucket
S3 Events
SQS Queue
Source
Encoder
SPOT or
On-Demand
Edge Cache
Fleet
Failover
ALB CloudFront Viewers
Diversified
SPOT Fleet
G2
M4
Egress
Bucket
GPU / CPU

34. Reference Architecture Available Soon
(ask us!)

35. Thank You!