Streamline OTT Delivery using Cloud Origins with Cloud Wrapper

by Alex Balford on October 10, 2018

By 2020, an estimated 92% of all workloads will be processed in cloud data centers.

The emergence of public cloud providers has changed the way organizations build, deploy and manage their applications and workflows.

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For organizations that’ve made the decision to move their video workflows to the cloud and either store their massive on demand content libraries or originate their linear channel lineups from the cloud, these cloud services need to work in tandem with an edge network (CDN) to deliver high quality streaming video at massive scale for demanding online audiences. When consumers access online content, they connect to the edge; It’s where clouds come together and digital life is experienced.

Each time content is retrieved from the cloud, it’s done so at a cost, often referred to as “egress fees.” When CDNs aren’t optimized to perform well with cloud-based workflows, large volumes of end user requests can make their way directly to the origin, causing cloud provider charges to soar and potentially impacting delivery performance. In extreme situations, large spikes in origin requests or traffic can even act like DDoS attacks leading to origin failure. The image below depicts these challenges.

Introducing Cloud Wrapper

To address these challenges, Akamai has announced Cloud Wrapper, which optimizes connectivity between public cloud infrastructures and the Akamai Intelligent Edge to eliminate these barriers to over-the-top (OTT) delivery from cloud environments without requiring changes to existing workflows.

Cloud Wrapper serves as a highly efficient custom caching layer that wraps around centralized cloud providers, shielding them in order to improve origin offload. More end user requests for live or on demand video content are served from Akamai, resulting in lower cloud egress charges and more consistent, high quality end user experiences.

The solution is designed to scale to massive and globally distributed audiences, and minimizes traffic back to origin, which enables online video providers to maximize viewer engagement and achieve higher levels of service predictability.