With ongoing economic pressure and audiences consuming content across an ever-widening range of devices and services, broadcasters need levels of flexibility, scalability and operational efficiency that cannot be achieved solely through traditional on-prem infrastructure. This is leading many broadcasters to turn to the cloud, with most making use of shared resources provided by public cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Some are also opting for a private cloud environment where cloud resources are not shared but are instead dedicated to their operation.
While there’s endless blogs and articles about why it makes sense to move to the cloud and how to go about the transition, there seems to be a lot less information readily available on the differences between public and private clouds and the advantages and disadvantages that these different cloud environments may bring. With that in mind, let’s look at what we mean by public cloud and private cloud, and consider the potential pros and cons that each brings to the table.
Public cloud providers provide cloud-based services, from storage, computing power and networking, alongside service provision covering all aspects of broadcast workflows, from ingest, storage, editing, to content management, delivery and playout. The hyperscaler cloud platforms like those already mentioned manage and maintain the infrastructure, with organisations essentially sharing the resources they provide. Public cloud providers give broadcasters access to cloud services on a pay-as-you-go basis which enables resources to be easily scaled with instances spun up/down as needed for flexible and agile working.
Although this model is highly flexible, provides high availability, and enables broadcasters to have a global presence without investing in physical infrastructure, it does rely on systems and infrastructure that is managed and maintained by third parties. Additionally, given that cloud resources are shared across organisations, performance and security can arguably be more easily affected by external factors outside of an individual organisation’s control. This may not sit particularly well with some broadcasters who want to retain full control over every aspect of their workflows, to ensure assured performance and data security.
Private clouds on the other hand are dedicated to a single organisation. Unlike public cloud services, resources are not accessed and shared across separate organisations. Private clouds can be either hosted on-premises in a company’s data centre or managed by a third-party provider in order to reduce management time. While private clouds may offer broadcasters greater control and security, and freedom to customise use, they don’t provide the elasticity and scalability that public cloud offers. They also generally incur higher costs and require more management resource than public cloud options.
Another option is a hybrid cloud model, which combines both public and private clouds. This approach enables broadcasters to use public cloud for scalability and
flexibility where it is needed most and then private cloud for those workflows where greater control and security are critical factors.
Determining which type of cloud environment is right for a specific operation will depend on a number of factors such as type of operation, budget, and specific requirements in terms of security, performance, elasticity, and scalability.
Whichever type of cloud environment you choose, it’s important to make sure that any deployed cloud solutions are cloud native. Cloud-native solutions are built from the ground up to run in cloud environments, unlike virtualised or cloud ready that are essentially software adapted for use in the cloud. As such, cloud native solutions are able to take full advantage of the cloud’s elasticity, scalability and flexibility, in a way that cloud ready simply cannot.
Veset’s all-in-one cloud playout platform, Veset Nimbus, is one example of a SaaS cloud-native solution that offers the flexibility to scale easily and the ability to adapt quickly to changing needs. It also leverages the cloud’s distributed architectures for resiliency and provides reliability through built-in redundancy.
Veset Nimbus is readily available through AWS for use by broadcast operations of any size from the smallest to the largest. Veset also has experience of deploying its solutions natively on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and across both large international and smaller local public cloud providers. Additionally, the Veset Nimbus’ standalone playout module can be deployed in any other public or private cloud (separate from the main backend/frontend and content storage cloud), or even within a completely different private cloud infrastructure. For larger scale operations wanting to deploy Veset Nimbus on private clouds or edge servers, non multi-tenant custom-tailored deployment options are available.
Get in touch with Veset today to find out more about how you can deploy Veset Nimbus in your chosen cloud environment, whether that is public cloud, private cloud or a hybrid public/private model.
