Executive Summary
Our client is a member of the World Broadcasters Union and works closely with the other regional broadcasting unions on matters of common concern. The customer wanted to develop secure application with high availability and seamless user experience for their media streaming and analytics.
About the Customer
The Union was established in 1964 as a non-profit, non-governmental, non- political, professional association with mandate to assist the development of broadcasting in the region. Our Customer promotes the collective interests of television and radio broadcasters as well as key industry players and facilitate regional and international media co-operation. The union runs a wide range of services, including the daily Asia vision TV news exchange, several co-productions, program exchanges and technical, programming, legal and management consultancies, as well as industry and international conferences and an international frequency planning and coordination.
Customer Challenge
The customer needed a Media Exchange Platform for its member organizations to exchange content. The customer was using two different SaaS solution providers for separate business units or departments. They wanted a single solution that would cater to all their requirements and was not billed by the number of users accessing the platform. The customer had a usage pattern that had a broad range of volume. From next to no users to thousands of users during peak usage. They also needed flexibility of UI across multiple devices. They could foresee a need in future where different departments would need different UX designs for their respective brands.
AspireNXT had designed a headless solution that is completely serverless. This required a strong API Gateway that could manage security and access control that will govern client access to the Web Data (Files, Media, User Data, etc.) directly. Moreover, the access had to be role-based access permissions and they wanted a certain level of security to be established to avoid deliberate or accidental irregularities.
Why AWS
ABU media exchange evaluated several cloud providers before selecting Amazon Web Services (AWS). They concluded that Building their web application in the most cost-effective solution, and AWS provides all those services which faster and more efficient way is to build the application and deliver it. The organization wanted to have serverless approach for web application deployment to run applications.
To facilitate the continuous build and deployment environment in AWS, our client chose to work with AspireNXT, an IT services provider that is part of the AWS Partner Network (APN).
Partner Solution
Aspire NXT suggested to use an API Gateway wherein anyone trying to access any AWS resource had to go through this gateway. The following operations are being sent to the API Gateway; which in turn executes the requests using lambda functions:
o Live Streaming service from Elemental Media Live
o Read/Write of data operations into DynamoDB
o Read/Write object into AWS S3 bucket
o Backend Lambda based Web Application calls
o API calls to Cognito pool
o Document updates to AWS Cloud search
- Restful API is integrated to get pre-signed S3 bucket URL to upload file attachments from the application to destination S3 bucket.
- Endpoints are enabled with Edge-optimized and ensuring cost optimization, security and performance.
- CORS configuration is enabled.
- AWS WAF service is integrated with API Gateway service.
- Enabled CloudWatch metrics for monitoring health checks and HTTP calls status.
Results and and Benefits
By using API Gateway, ABU Media Exchange was able to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure REST and WebSocket APIs at any scale.
• API gateway is set up to request authorization and verify request to AWS services. The AWS Lambda function is used to verify tokens and if validated the access is granted to the API.
• As with all the services included in AWS, the Amazon API gateway also provides the option of pay as you go. The service does not require any monthly or annual subscription. There is no startup or minimum cost; you only pay for incoming calls and data processed out.
• After the deployment of an API, the API can be tested from the application by generating SDKs. The SDK helps the developer by automatically managing retries and detecting network or other errors.
• Monitor the API in a secure and scalable environment.
• API versioning to ensure compatibility between multiple API implementations without any code changes.
• Memory management and data caching mechanisms to improve API performance and response times.
