Since COVID-19 struck – and even before – agility has been a key requirement for global media companies that want to spend less money creating more flexible workflows for a greater return on investment. And, importantly, they want to easily access and manage those workflows remotely. As the IABM Structural Trends As a Service Report published last summer shows, “Agility translates into continuous software updates driven by customer feedback rather than the release of major products every few years – a major feature of on-premise product releases.”

The key to implementing agile workflows is the use of microservices architecture, but what are microservices and why are they important for our industry? As our CTO Julian Fernandez-Campon recently told IBC365 reporter David Davies, “If you think about transport you can compare the old, monolithic system to having a big lorry that is able to transport a lot of things in one journey. By contrast, microservices is like a series of compact vans carrying smaller amounts, but offering more flexibility. You don’t need the capacity of the large lorry that’s there regardless of what you have to transport; instead, you only use what you need. In addition, you improve the redundancy, because if the big lorry crashes you stop the transport service whereas with the small vans you’re still able to continue. ”

This is a huge benefit for broadcasters as it reduces costs; speeds up deployment; improves elasticity and a variety of services; and provides efficient content delivery to multiple platforms. Component-based media management can quickly configure new platforms and can handle new UHD formats in a simple and efficient way. This can be combined with platforms that allow BIY (Build it Yourself), which means they are not dependent on specific vendors.

Elegant and simple workflows that support remote operations and are easy to deploy, maintain and update or modify will be a fundamental system parameter for the industry going forwards and microservices architecture and component-based media management are key drivers for this. Microservices are perfectly suited to software as a service (SaaS) and iPaaS models, if they are designed based on business requirements to spin up and down according to business needs. Every day new applications emerge that customers want to integrate into their processes or they want to replace others that have become obsolete. They expect immediate answers and simple solutions that they can implement themselves. This infrastructure allows M&E companies to adopt powerful and holistic application integration strategies.

Which brings us back to agility. The IABM report explains that agility also means, “flexibility in satisfying different customer requirements from a deployment perspective. While some customers may want to quickly pivot their operations in an as-a-service world, others may prefer a more gradual approach with a mixture of on-premise and cloud-based deployments. This is where Tedial’s Hybrid Cloud architecture comes into its own. Hybrid Cloud enables companies to efficiently operate using their current architecture with the capability to evolve as future operational and commercial factors change. To maximise Hybrid Cloud, users need a dynamic content management solution, like aSTORM, which is part of our award-winning Evolution MAM system.  aSTORM provides the ‘link’ between various storage and hosting scenarios. Using logical storage groups and rules defined within each group, the technology seamlessly moves, backs-up and restores content when and where required. This includes on-premise live storage, nearline storage, deep archive tape libraries or public cloud storage such as AWS S3, AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive or Microsoft Azure Blob Storage. 

We can see that by adopting microservices, M&E companies can fully embrace agile workflows and infrastructures throughout their facilities. Don’t miss our May blog, which will take a deeper dive into the benefits of microservices.

If you would like to learn how Tedial can help you to do this then get in touch today.

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media asset management software

Tedial