Migrating live streaming applications onto clouds: challenges and a CloudStorm solution

Live TV production, due to its distributed nature,

requires broadcasters to deploy equipments and human resources

to several different places. This increases production costs.

The traditional method through outside broadcasting vans is

expensive. Migrating this type of application onto clouds is a

promising method to reduce the cost. However, the Quality of

Experience (QoE) can hardly be assured because of the cloud

performance uncertainty. Auto-scaling the infrastructure based

on dynamic workloads at runtime is also difficult. The feasibility

of CloudsStorm framework, which is the core component of

SWITCH (Software Workbench for Interactive, Time Critical

and Highly self-adaptive Cloud applications) workbench, handling

the lifecycle of the time critical application development

and performance monitoring, infrastructure planning and provisioning,

etc., is demonstrated with the aspect of live events

broadcasting. It makes a significant attempt to fill the DevOps gap

when migrating applications from legacy systems onto clouds. A

live streaming application is demonstrated as a use case example.