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Cloud computing is more than just marketing buzz. It’s a mature, enterprise-ready technology approach that is changing the economics and workflows of entire industries. And the team here at Panvidea is passionate about applying its benefits to the worlds of media, advertising, and direct marketing.
This all-encompassing term has been defined in many different ways and encompasses a range of on-demand or online computing models. But don’t be fooled. Not all so-called “cloud computing” solutions provide the same benefits or unique characteristics. For example, many pundits cite basic Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications such as Gmail or Salesforce.com are examples of “cloud computing.” Although web applications such as these are hosted remotely and accessed via an online interface, they cannot be said to represent the true potential of cloud computing.
Other offerings, which tout the benefits of infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS) or “utility computing” may come closer to realizing this potential, but they still don’t guarantee that an application is utilizing cloud computing to its fullest potential.
So what is the real potential – and defining characteristic – of cloud computing? In one word: scalability.
Just because an application is hosted by Amazon Web Services or a similar utility computing service does not make it truly powerful or innovative in itself. A lot of applications that are built on utility platforms are nothing more than plain old web applications. They make no effort to optimize the use or availability of these shared resources and are, therefore, little better than the first generation of hosted services, which relied on a fixed infrastructure for every customer. Scaling these sorts of applications required the installation of new hardware. Virtual servers are really no different than regular servers if they are running all the time and have no element of automatic scalability. Virtual servers take a fraction of the time to set up, but the performance and cost efficiency enhancements of such a system are minimal. True cloud computing requires intelligent resource management to ensure real scalability and performance. For example, web applications can use services like Rightscale to automatically scale up and down based on traffic. Now that’s new.
Panvidea uses cloud computing to its fullest. By analyzing the amount of traffic, specifically the unpredictable peaks and valleys inherent to video processing and distribution, Panvidea scales up its resources immediately. And when the resources are no longer needed, we release them to the cloud. This is why we are able to price our service as a utility. But how many resources do you need? The answer requires a deep analysis of the input source video, the formats in the selected output workflow and an immense understanding of the nature of video processing. SD vs. HD, one-pass vs. two-pass and post processing filters such as splicing, clipping, cropping, overlays and thumbnail extraction all have implications on the processing speed of an entire job. Panvidea analyzes each job individually to determine the proper allocation, performs the job and learns from the results the optimal amount of resources to allocate in the future.
This automatically scalable form of utility computing is the new feature that makes cloud computing worthy of its nomenclature. When an application can scale up and down automatically it is truly using the cloud to its fullest.
