Serving digital content is one of the most basic and straightforward tasks - that is, until you have serious requirements for low latency, high availability, durability, access control, and millions of views on or under budget. In addition, because of "spiky" usage patterns, operations teams often need to provision static hardware, network, and management resources to support the maximum expected need, which guarantees waste outside of peak hours.
AWS provides a suite of services specifically tailored to deliver high-performance media serving. Each service features pay as you go pricing on an elastic infrastructure - meaning that you can scale up and down according to your demand curve while paying for only the resources you use. BEcause this infrastructure is programmable, it can react quickly.
| Step | Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | Simple and Secure - This reference architecture uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to host static content on the web. Amazon S3 is highly available, highly durable, and designed for web scale. It provides a great way to offload the work of serving static content from web servers. It also provide secure access to this content over HTTPS. |
| 2 | Faster and Edge Cached - As you customer base grows and becomes more geographically distributed, using a high-performance edge cache like Amazon CloudFront can provide substantial improvements in latency, fault tolerance, and cost. By using Amazon S3 as the origin server for the Amazon CloudFront distribution, you gain the advantages of fast in-network data transfer rates, simple publishing/caching workflow, and a unified security framework. Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront can be configured by a web service, the AWS Management Console, or a host of third-party management tools. |
| 3 | Alternatively, you could use Amazon Elastic Comput Cloud (EC2) as origin server of Amazon S3 for hosting static content. Using Amazon EC2 could allow you a greater degree of control, logging, and feature richness in serving content. For static content, you could also substitute your own on-premises or cohosted private servers as origin servers for Amazon CloudFront. |
| 4 | Live Streaming - AWS supports Adobe Flash Media Server hosted on Amazon EC2, combined with Amazon CloudFront for stream distribution andc aching, live streaming works seamlessly on the AWS platform. This configuration uses a web server to host the manifest.xml file, Amazon DevPay EC2 instances to host Flash Media Server with hourly license pricing, and Amazon CloudFront to serve the stream. Regarding the license policy, please refer at http://www.adobe.com/go/fmsaws |