SVTA Sandbox
Problem Statement
To facilitate the spin-up of a temporary, end-to-end streaming workflow in a cloud environment which meets the demands/needs of a working group to test assumptions, ideas, and optimization techniques as part of a larger project.
Project Description
Working Groups within the SVTA need a way to easily test assumptions, ideas, and optimization recommendations which form part of project deliverables. But establishing “lab environments”, especially when they involve physical machines, can be labor intensive, not to mention hard to source.
To facilitate the creation of temporary lab environments for testing purposes, this project intends to build a dynamic “sandbox” using common cloud platforms (i.e., Google, Amazon, Akamai, Microsoft, etc.), provisioning technologies (i.e., Terraform), and SVTA member containerized technologies linked to a library of on-demand video files as well as live streams. When working groups are engaged in projects which require a test environment, they can employ an interface (whether GUI or CLI), to automate the instantiation of a cloud-based instance containing one or more streaming technologies, such as an encoder, packager, and player, which can then be configured (through the individual technology files or configuration interfaces) to run specific tests and gather data.
The SVTA Sandbox revolutionizes the way working groups develop best practices and solutions for streaming video. With this powerful tool, any working group can seamlessly define and deploy end-to-end streaming environments, test different configurations, collect metrics, and explore new technologies — all using an ecosystem of vendor-supported building blocks using industry-standard approaches like Terraform and Docker. What once took months of coordination can now be accomplished by a single person in under an hour. This release empowers SVTA Working Groups to enhance the SVTA’s mission of improving the delivery of high-quality video at scale.
Goals and Objectives
This project has the following objectives:
- Create a simplified way for working groups to build lab environments for testing
- Create a modular approach for building a workflow out of a catalog of vendor technologies
- Automate the spin-up of infrastructure needed for a lab environment
- Automate the destruction of lab environment infrastructure once testing has been completed
Project Scope
This project DOES cover the following:
- Terraform framework for automating the instantiation of cloud infrastructure to support a streaming workflow
- Individual Terraform recipes for containerized vendor technologies to deploy as part of a workflow. These will be contained in separate repos within the overall project repo. This will provide a cleaner and more manageable way to maintain individual vendor recipes.
- Automation methods and tools to run the Terraform scripts on a cloud provider
- Automation methods and tools to destroy an existing workflow instance
- Terraform templates to accelerate development of vendor Terraform recipes
- Documentation
- A GUI to allow working group users to select terraform recipes for inclusion and appropriate UX elements to start the automation process
- Instance hour tracking and alerting (when instances exceed budgeted thresholds)
- Budget allocation for a given instance
- Administrative GUI/controls (outside of what is provided in the cloud platform) for managing existing instances
Contributors
The following members have contributed to this project. Click on their name to visit their profile. If they have not published their profile, the link will redirect to their LinkedIn profile.
Additional References
There are no additional references or other required readings need to participate in this project.
Presentations
There are no presentations associated with this project.
Videos
SVTA Sandbox
A video showing how to setup a workflow in Google Cloud using the SVTA Sandbox repo.