Video: Standardising Microservices on the Basis of MCMA

Microservices are a way of splitting up large programs and systems into many, many, smaller parts. Building up complex workflows from these single-function modules makes has many benefits including simplifying programming and testing, upgrading your system seamlessly with no downtime, scalability and the ability to run on the cloud. Microservices were featured last week on The Broadcast Knowledge. Microservices do present challenges, such as orchestrating hundreds of processes into a coherent media workflow.

The EBU is working with SMPTE and the Open Services Alliance for Media on a cloud-agnostic open source project called MCMA, Media Cloud Microservice Architecture. The MCMA project isn’t a specification, rather it a set of software providing tools to enable a move to microservices. We hear from Alexandre Rouxel from the EBU and Loïc Barbou from Bloomberg that this project started out of a need from some broadcasters to create a scalable infrastructure that could sit on a variety of cloud infrastructure.

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What is a service? Created a standard idea of a service that contains standard operations. Part of the project is a set of libraries that work with NodeJS and .net which deal with the code needed time and time again such as logging, handling data repositories, security etc. Joost Rovers explains how the Job Processor and Service Registry work together to orchestrate the media workflows and ensure there’s a list of every microservice available, and how to communicate with it. MCMA places shims in front of cloud services on GCP, AWS, Azure etc in order that each service looks the same. Joost outlines the libraries and modules available for MCMA and how they could be used.

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Speakers

Loic Barbou Loïc Barbou
Consultant,
Bloomberg
Alexandre Rouxel Alexandre Rouxel
Data Scientist & Project Coordinator,
EBU
Joost Rovers Joost Rovers
Managing Director,
Rovers IT

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