Building Highly Scalable Immersive Media Solutions on AWS

Editor's Notes

• #5: - these are common processes for content production across pp/p/finishing/etc
• #8: And finally… lots of options for global deployment. Gartner estimates that AWS has significantly more compute capacity than all other major cloud providers combined, and we do that while providing extremely high reliability. We currently provide 15 regions and 40 availability zones (or AZ’s). For us, a region will always contain at least two AZ’s on wholly separate power grids and flood plains, and an AZ is always comprised of multiple data centers to provide redundancy within the AZ. We don’t build single data center regions, because it wouldn’t offer the reliability required for enterprise businesses.   This highly available global network allows you deploy your applications near your customers much faster and simpler than what can be achieved with a traditional model.
• #11: - these are common processes for content production across pp/p/finishing/etc
• #12: - ingest - moving content to aws in part or whole - does not preclude hybrid - key here is flexibility to rapidly import source content
• #13: - storage not limited to aws alone - global filesystem, caching appliances for editors that work on-prem - in cloud, on prem or hybrid partner solutions - marketplace to spin many up
• #14: - appliances for edit - protocols to move bits - local and attached storage - desktop apps all the way up to full paas solutions that incorporate spot, etc.
• #15: - spot for ec2 - scheduling and management - rendering, processing, encryption (watermarking), proxies, etc. - s3 output, which enables cloudfront -> delivery
• #18: Slide: AWS Purchase Models As shown by the previous slide, it is possible to launch significant amounts of compute power for a low cost. Customer have several models available when using Amazon EC2. - Cover the three pricing models on the slide On demand is the easiest way to get started with AWS. No commitment, pay as you go. Reserved instances provide a significant discount in exchange for a commitment to use the services for some period of time, either 1 or 3 years. Reserved instances also come with an actual capacity reservation, which can be important for large enterprises who need a high level of assurance that computing resources will be available when they are needed. Spot instances are a unique and powerful pricing model, in particular for HPC. With Spot, customers can bid on unused AWS capacity and are often able to launch instances on the cloud for as little as 10% of the equivalent on-demand rate. The tradeoff for Spot is if other customers are willing to pay more than you for the same AWS instance type, or capacity of that type becomes constrained, your running jobs may be terminated without warning. Jobs running on Spot therefore need to be fault-tolerant, or able to be restarted again at a later time.
• #19: What spare capacity looks like 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. Amazon S3 holds trillions of objects and regularly peaks at millions of requests per second.
• #21: So with EC2 Spot the rules are actually really simple. Rule 1: The Spot market is where price of compute fluctuations based on supply and demand. Rule 2: You’ll never pay more than your bid, in fact you’ll only ever pay the market price. When the market price exceeds your bid you get 2 minutes to wrap up. Market price is on average 85% lower than On-Demand prices
• #24: What is in a market.. This is one of the most important, and unfortunately misunderstood elements of how the spot market works. While we say Spot market there are actually hundreds of Spot markets available to all our customers. AWS has 11 (?) regions around the world, in each region there are multiple availability zones and multiple instance families and multiple instance sizes per family.. (START CLICK THROUGH and READ). E.g. c3. e.g. large, xlarge, 8xlarge, e.g. US-West-2a, US-West-2b, e.g. Dublin Region, Oregon Region, Sydney Region.
• #25: Now that we understand what a spot market is and that there are many I’ll explain how we acquire the capacity. I’m going to pick just one market to highlight this. There are two numbers you care about with Spot. Bid price. Think of this as the cap, the maximum you’re willing to pay for a given instance per hour. Market price. This is the price you pay. Market price is set by periodic auctions The r3.4xlarge costs $1.4 under our On-Demand purchasing option. See it in action via 3 bids. 25%, 50%, 75%. Single Zone. 25% you kept your instance for almost 7 days, being impacted during a few short periods. However, you only paid the market price which was 86% off, just less than 20c per hour during the last week, only 14% of the OD price. At 50% you would have been interrupted just once, for a very short period of time during the sixth day. You’re average discount during the week is 85% just 21c per hour, paying just 15% of OD. At 75% you would not once have been interrupted, achieving an average discount of 85% just 21c an hour, again paying just 15% of OD.
• #26: We will first run through what the ‘best practices’ for EC2. While these are not necessary, they’re what the most sophisticated customers do to get high performance, high availability and low costs. Standard practice Stateless Fault tolerant Multi-AZ SOA/Loosely coupled design Spot Practice Be instance flexible This can mean c3.large, c3.xlarge,..r3.large Or m3.large, r3.large, c3.large (ELB) No seriously, your application can work with other instances (use example, drive this message home hard). You use c3.xlarge and you can’t AT all use c3.2xlarge? Really? Really?  Even if we give you 70% off for twice the c3.xlarge specs?
• #29: 1000 vCores, at an average saving of 80% off On-Demand. While some capacity fluctuated we had our desired capacity of 1000 for over 98% of the time. During the 30 days we were never more than 4%, or 40 cores below our desired capacity while maintaining an average of 1012 cores. Instances used - c3.2xlarge c3.4xlarge c3.8xlarge cc2.8xlarge cr1.8xlarge r3.2xlarge r3.4xlarge r3.8xlarge in All AZs