Change is inevitable in the media and entertainment industry, and that aura resonates throughout a business transformed through consolidation. Today’s most recognised global broadcasters have largely grown through acquisitions, developing into corporate conglomerates with many different independent divisions and teams.
Naturally, the technology choices these teams made as independent entities must come together in ways that ultimately serve a common purpose. The challenges in bringing these disparate systems and technologies together are often complex, and there is no greater example than considering cloud strategies.
Businesses of all types typically standardise on a singular cloud provider upon entering the cloud universe. They invest time and money into cloud provisioning, the process of choosing, deploying and managing software and hardware resources. The next step is to build out an infrastructure that emphasises the cloud-specific features most important to the business’s operations. As businesses advance through their journeys, they invest more resources and essentially attach themselves to the specifics of the cloud they selected.
As companies grow, the transition to a multi-cloud environment is inevitable. The different teams that suddenly come together have all made substantial investments in accepting and building an infrastructure around a specific cloud provider. They have favored providers that meet their expectations for network jitter, bandwidth costs, and/or loss characteristics across ground-to-cloud links. In the end, they need to develop an interoperable multi-cloud solution that abstracts the different networking realities of each cloud.
The road to multi-cloud
While multi-cloud may be inevitable, it’s not easy. For broadcasters, the journey typically starts with building a hybrid network in which some likely workloads are migrated to the cloud first, and run in parallel to on-prem workloads. Ultimately the desire to have unified processes leads to a grander vision – a properly configured hybrid network that seamlessly integrates the broadcaster’s on-premises network with a public cloud network with a common media workflow supporting both.
Initially, most broadcasters build their hybrid cloud networks with independent processes that separately support their on-prem and cloud networks. That approach requires two different skillsets, two different sets of deployment methods, and two different product suites. When confronting the requirement to integrate multiple clouds into those hybrid workflows, the problem becomes even more complex.
The reality is that the public clouds are very different, with unique provisioning processes and networking realities. When the time for multi-cloud arrives, it’s critical to have what we at swXtch.io call a common data plane implemented across on-prem broadcast networks, on-prem distribution networks and cloud networks to make a multi-cloud strategy work.
swXtch.io and its cloudSwXtch virtual overlay network provide the foundation to establish that common data plane, which normalises the network behaviour of each cloud provider. For example, broadcasters using a virtual machine within one cloud may experience a sudden reduction in bandwidth because of that cloud’s service agreements and congestion state. cloudSwXtch accounts for those differences and makes the network behave similarly on different clouds.
cloudswXtch provides a self-configuring network that reduces the reliance on the network specifics of different cloud services. cloudswXtch also offers a common set of features across the different clouds in a multi-cloud network, reducing the need for multiple teams with cloud-specific solutions. This provides a single view of packet flows with many benefits. If an application in one cloud originates a source stream that is added to a multicast group, that stream can natively flow into another cloud’s multicast-aware endpoints using a standard IGMP join command.
As media businesses scale, whether through acquisitions, expansion into other regions, or a general need for more capacity, redundancy, or elasticity, enabling homogeneity among the cloud networks that accounts for their different idiosyncrasies is an important consideration in making a multi-cloud strategy work.
