I work in streaming video, specialise on AWS, and have enjoyed using Step Functions for certain (non-video) projects. I am _astonished_ that Step Functions + S3 was even considered as a starting point for defect detection in streaming video. Astonished.
Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
331–340 of 526 posts
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#332My word. I'm sort of gob smacked this article exists. I know there are nuances in the article, but my first impression was it's saying "we went back to basics and stopped using needless expensive AWS stuff that caused us to completely over architect our application and the results were much better". Which is good lesson, and a good story, but there's a kind of irony it's come from an internal Amazon team. As another…
Yeah this article seems like heresy for someone at Amazon to have written about AWS, no way it lives long.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was an article not long ago from AWS saying they'll be focussing on cutting cost for customers. Maybe the next step of that process will be pushing their clients off of AWS and telling them to just host on prem.
I know you're joking around, but no, as they also explained a benefit of cloud (and therefore using AWS) is that it can scale flexibly with their customers' businesses. If your business invests in physical servers anticipating strong growth next year then later finds out actually we're going into a recession and those servers are no longer needed, then that's a sunk cost. With cloud if demand drops you can scale up a…
Scale to zero has always been my favorite feature of serverless compute. If there was a fast way to do it with VMs, I'd certainly consider it.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#334I think serverless has its place, but this problem doesn't seem like a fantastic fit. We are looking into serverless as a way to exhibit to our customers that we are strictly following certain pre-packaged compliance models. Cost & performance are a distant 2nd concern to security & compliance for us. And to be clear - we aren't necessarily talking about actual security - this is more about making a B2B client feel m…
Overall, like it's stated in the article, it would be a case-by-case choice what to use.
My experience tells me it's always a good idea to start with the monolith but I don't know much about PII to tell you your idea is over-engineered.
I feel there are better ways though.
Also because you don't need to use Lambda to not be on-prem EC2 is enough.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Which is good lesson, and a good story, but there’s a kind of irony it’s come from an internal Amazon team. As another poster commented, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s taken down at some point. Why? Using the model they switched to (which uses a different set of AWS services) instead of the model they switched from is a recommendation that the AWS tech advisers that are made available to enterprise customers will…
Have you had AWS tech advisers advise teams in your company to go with this stack? Because I haven't. AWS doesn't have an equally distributed interest in selling all of its products. Some AWS products exist because customers need/demand them and others exist because they provide higher margins and tighter lock-in to Amazon: the first type of products are great for customer acquisition, the role of their sales folk is…
I guess it depends on what you mean by "AWS tech advisers" ... I've had two different AWS recommended partners advise us to go to this stack, one of the partners even tried to explain that despite more than doubling in costs we would "make it up in faster development".
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was an article not long ago from AWS saying they'll be focussing on cutting cost for customers. Maybe the next step of that process will be pushing their clients off of AWS and telling them to just host on prem.
I know you're joking around, but no, as they also explained a benefit of cloud (and therefore using AWS) is that it can scale flexibly with their customers' businesses. If your business invests in physical servers anticipating strong growth next year then later finds out actually we're going into a recession and those servers are no longer needed, then that's a sunk cost. With cloud if demand drops you can scale up a…
> If your business invests in physical servers anticipating strong growth next year then later finds out actually we're going into a recession and those servers are no longer needed, then that's a sunk cost.
Yes, but that sunk cost is probably still lower than what you paid AWS for the option to scale up and down.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#337AWS has a great business model of people over "optimizing" their architecture using new toys from amazon and being charged through the nose for it. It's amazing how clients that are doing a few requests per second will want a fully distributed, serverless, microservice + dynamodb + s3 + athena + etc + etc, in order to serve a semi-static web app and print some reports off throughout the day and pay 10-50k a month whe…
Yes, and it attracts just the wrong kind of dev/architects.
At a previous shop, we hired a cloud architect to drive our "cloud adoption".
He of course bet the farm on a set of new AWS services that were barely in version v0.9 to be the backbone of the system he architected.
It quickly became clear even he had no experience with the set of tools & services he had advocated, and the whole thing went off the rails slowly & surely.
Low & behold 100% of existing customers are still on the on-prem offering 2 years later, and if you throw in the new customers that were shoehorned onto the AWS offering, his team has captured 2% of customer use after 2 years of effort.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, my intuition would put it to 1% vs. 99% (difficult to quantify of course). I haven't yet seen a project/product which would need microservice architecture for technical reasons. If you need to scale, you can just scale monoliths (perhaps serving in different roles). The use case for microservice architecture is IMHO an organizational / high level architecture driven. I've worked in a big company (20K employe…
I built a little microservice on the side of my monolith for PDF creation. It used headless chrome and ghostscript to render html to a nice PDF. The problem I had with having that code inside the monolith was that it increased my docker image creation for deploys by a lot . And that code pretty much never changed anyway. I did feel a bit embarrassed having to make a microservice after having argued against them so mu…
You can produce multiple docker images from the same codebase quite easily. You can deploy and scale them separately. None of that requires separate repositories or expensive RPC instead of local function calls.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if you have a really big database? Still 2minutes?
I'm intentionally ignoring any of the sarcasm in your comment. The time needed for a db dump is always dependent upon the amount of data. This is true regardless of the db software or where it's running.
I can't think of any project I've worked on where the main data base could be backed up and restored to a different database in "2 minutes"
The sarcasm was warranted.
Re: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
#340I'm pretty convinced that microservices are one of those things that make sense 5% of the time and the other 95% is cargo culting.
I agree, my intuition would put it to 1% vs. 99% (difficult to quantify of course). I haven't yet seen a project/product which would need microservice architecture for technical reasons. If you need to scale, you can just scale monoliths (perhaps serving in different roles). The use case for microservice architecture is IMHO an organizational / high level architecture driven. I've worked in a big company (20K employe…
There's also developer push from two sides; developers want to do microservices because it gives them gratification (new problems to solve! new architectures! Rewrite!), and employers want to attract developers (we do microservices! Blockchain! IoT!). So much in software development these days is hype and self-gratification.