Transforming OTT through DevOps and Microservices
With the sharp rise in the consumption of data, media-related services and content on the internet, there has been a surge in OTT platforms around the globe. OTT platforms have been attracting the television viewers on these On-Demand Media by delivering high-quality content directly on user’s mobile phones and has completely changed the definition of entertainment for the modern customer. From the land of opportunity United States, Netflix is considered the industry leader and is known for its cutting edge technology, proprietary media content and innovative methods of storytelling.
Netflix is one such player which has utilised and evolved its microservices to its fullest. The trend has been followed by multiple OTT and media and entertainment companies by incorporating the DevOps development methodology to make operations leaner and less time-consuming. In 2017, only 10% of the global enterprises were using the DevOps methodology. However, this increased to 17% in 2018, reported by Statista. Video-based content requires scalable infrastructure and efficient methods to incorporate services at scale. It also requires extensive use of data centres for virtualisation to reduce operational costs. This is followed by cloud computing and cloud infrastructure to take advantage of economies of scale in hardware infrastructure.
The slow death of Television
Moreover, even the television experience is now governed by internet players. Media houses are inclined to create their on-demand media solutions to deliver their existing content to the modern customer. Since half a century, broadcasters and TV operators forced the customer to get accustomed to their proprietary media content, according to their schedule and leaving no scope of flexibility. As the digital revolution takes place, the emergence of OTT platforms has transformed media related services and have improved user experience by leaps and bounds.
This gives an immense opportunity for microservices and DevOps to act as a bridge between software development and operational management in the media-related fields. DevOps shortens the software development cycle, ensures seamless updates, quick enhancements and iterations by reducing the friction between development and operational teams.
DevOps for Scalability
It requires a cultural shift in the software development arena to have a radical overhaul in supporting microservices, which includes various small components. Containers are developed to insulate application development and virtualize any kind of dependence on hardware. Google Kubernetes is one such system which manages containers for seamless DevOps. It allows portability to companies for deployment on the cloud and in house IT environment. These containers can be improved without changing any underlying operational metrics and provide standardised interfaces with version management. For media and entertainment services, this creates a foundation for distributed microservices and allows smaller and independent features to deploy and manage dynamically with faster development and release.
Reduces Unpredictability
It is evident that IT development is full of challenges and opportunities. The same goes for DevOps and microservices, as there can be significant challenges related to release management, tracking, visibility and compliances. DevOps projects are highly unpredictable as enterprises find it hard to keep track of resources, microservices associated components and face challenges in seamless integration. Tools developed with Kubernetes and other orchestration systems require development and operational teams to automate the processes. One of the most benefits of the cloud is that the capacity can be scaled according to the demand and provide enterprises with flexible payments. This offers companies to be agile, scalable and scale microservices according to requirements in real-time.
Netflix uses its robust network by self-serviced engineering systems for microservices development through DevOps led automation platform. This has helped Netflix to test potential challenges in the production environment and determine the software behaviour in case of failures. To a surprise, even Netflix finally migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud computing requirements and its Open Connect CDN in 2016. Netflix uses subscriber management, user profile management, recommendation profiling and analytics on the cloud infrastructure while uses Open Connect to store video content and delivery management. In the initial years of Netflix, it outsourced its streaming video delivery to third-party CDN, but somehow it’s vendors struggled to meet its SLAs as its traffic surged. Netflix installed Open Connect appliances to meet the consumption needs inside the local internet service provider’s data centres. Through insightful use of algorithms to understand recommendation, popularity and storage techniques, Netflix offloads content through optimal efficiency by reducing demand on upstream network capacity.
Netflix has been working on the technical measures to ensure rapid recovery in case of downtime. The best thing is that the company culture embraces such ideas which makes it the most powerful OTT in the world. Netflix uses DevOps and microservices to its full extent to stimulate innovation and balance software requirements with security safety and fundamental rules. With constant innovation and DevOps implementation, Netflix ecosystem can become more responsible in microservices development and can augment their video services to grow across various regions, languages and devices.
