Video: Media’s Brave New World of Interop Microservices

‘Microservices’ can have several meanings, but centres on the ability to create a workflow from individual building blocks using very simple, individual services/programs running on a number of computers. Microservices are generally understood to improve interoperability, which is one of the many benefits of a microservices environment that this panel explores.

Splitting your work into microservices promises to allow your products to be deployed in a more automated way and may help them work with a decentralised structure (where such structure makes sense). Because microservices are intended to be very simple, self-contained programs, you can be very specific about what you run and therefore only pay for the compute you need, in a cloud context.

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Indeed, the cloud is pushing software architects in the right direction. Whilst cloud isn’t intrinsically microservices-based, it’s highly modular which promotes similar coding practices in developers as they would need working directly with native microservices. For instances, many programs have an Amazon S3 interface. Working to this type of standard API is exactly what is needed for microservice architectures.

One of the benefits to splitting everything into the simplest building blocks is time to market. This can be considered in two ways, how long take it takes to update/change an existing workflow and how quickly you can iterate. Both linked, being flexible in the workflow means you can quickly iterate when necessary; you don’t need a two-year project in order to update your way of working and the cost of failure is low.

What’s the alternative to microservices? Often referred to as a monolithic, it’s actually more about a having about mono-workflow. When your workflow is wrapped up into one product or binary, you can’t easily integrate new elements into this workflow. Microservices allow data to flow in the ‘open’ and allow the workflow be rerouted. Data at all different parts of the chain is available to any program that needs it.

The aim of the OSA looking at fundamental issues that can’t just fix unilaterally by one customer leading the roadmap with a vendor, rather it is seeking a wider agreement on how to interoperate between all these services.

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Speakers

Loic Barbou Loic Barbou
Bloomberg Television
Wes Rosenberg Wes Rosenberg
CTO,
Levels Beyond
Ankur Jain Ankur Jain
Prime Focus Technologies
Shawn Maynard Shawn Maynard
SVP & General Manager,
Florical Systems
Chris Lennon Moderator: Chris Lennon
Executive Director
Open Services Alliance

Video: Microservices & Media: Are we there yet?

Microservices split large applications into many small, simple, autonomous sections. This can be a boon, but this simplicity hides complexity. Chris Lennon looks at both sides to find the true value in microservices.

By splitting up a program/service into many small blocks, each of those blocks become simpler so testing each block becomes simpler. Updating one block hardly affects the system as a whole leading to quicker and more agile development and deployment. In fact, using microservices has many success stories attributed to it. Less vocal are those who have failures or increased operational problems due to their use.

Like any technology, there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ times and places to deploy it. Chris, from MediAnswers, explains where he sees the break-even line between non-deploying and deploying microservices and explains his reasons which include hidden comlexity, your teams’ ability to deal with these many services and covers some of the fallacies at play which tend to act against you.

A group has started up within SMPTE who want to reduce the friction in implementing microservices which include general interoperability and also interoperability across OSes. This should reduce the work needed to get microservices from different vendors working together as one.

Chris explains the work to date and the plans for the future for this working group.

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Speakers

Chris Lennon Chris Lennon
President & CEO,
MediAnswers