As a global media organization, Reuters delivers a wide array of event-specific content and applications tied to the news of the day. While the size and scale of each event may vary between a national election to regional breaking news, one thing they all have in common is that they are short-lived, topical, and time-critical. As a result, there is only one chance to get it right. The AWS Cloud is a perfect enabler for that, with a wide range of services. In this session Reuters shares its approach to building, managing, and monitoring robust systems for live events. This session is brought to you by AWS partner, Datadog.

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Reuters Lives: Scaling & Monitoring
Live Video in the Cloud
Romeo Radanyi
Associate Architect
Thomson Reuters
D E V 3 1 6 - S
Kirk Kaiser
Technical Evangelist
Datadog

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Who we are
Each day, 2,500 Reuters
journalists in nearly
200 locations around the
globe deliver unparalleled
international and national
news coverage in
16 languages with speed,
impartiality, and insight

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Shifts in technology and delivery of news
In 1865 news travelled across the Atlantic with the speed of a . . .

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Watching the transformation
Experiencing the Lincoln
assassination by means of
telegrams
Experiencing the Lincoln
assassination by means of
steamship and telegram hybrid

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Telegram was only the beginning
• Radio
• Cable
• Satellite
• Internet – Cloud

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News ingestion and
distribution platform
• Being consistently first with
news matters most
• Easily pluggable for
downstream news agencies
• Having accurate, reliable
news

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What did we have to do?
• Project to migrate off a third-party provider
• Build it completely on AWS – Aim for serverless!
• Make use of hardware acceleration
• Provide ingestion/consumption flexibility
• Support small to large events in low latency

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Streaming challenges – Where are the standards?
• Transport layer – TCP, UDP
• Protocols – HLS, HDS, MPEG-DASH, RTMP, RTMPT, RTMPS, SRT,
WebRTC, RTP, RTPS . . .
• Framerates – 25, 29.97, 30, 50, 60 . . .
• Compression – H.264, HEVC, VP9

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How did we do it?
Used an extensive number of AWS services to make our life easier
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – Our infrastructure and servers
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) – Our data lake
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) – Our block storage
Application Load Balancer (ALB) – Our load balancer
Amazon CloudWatch – Our monitoring
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) – Our network
AWS Step Functions – Our VOD workflow orchestrator
Amazon API Gateway – Our webservice
AWS Lambda – Our glue
Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) – Our start/stop signaller for events
Amazon Kinesis – Our messaging service
Amazon DynamoDB – Our event metadata and subscription database
Amazon CloudFront – Our content delivery network
AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) – Our parameter store and remote instance manager

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Simplified architecture . . .
AWS Cloud

16. Simplified
architecture

17. Architecture . . .
The real one

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Stream manager
• Metadata/subscription
• Live event signal
• Our best friend
• Metadata/subscription storage
• VOD orchestrator
• Our first gate

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Monitoring Cloud Functions with Datadog

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Live event routing
Reuters Lives
AWS Cloud
Region
Region
Nginx Streaming
Engine
Nginx Streaming
Engine
Nginx Streaming
Engine
Nginx Streaming
Engine

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Challenges
• Offloading request counts
• Unexpected load is still a thing – Application Load Balancer prewarming!
• Internet delivery is still inconsistent
• Broadcast quality cloud-based standards conversion
• Wish we could use containers . . . but

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What else can we do?
• Why not AWS Media Services?
• Spot Instances?
• Machine and deep learning
• AI and cognitive computing
• On demand satellites?

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Delivering re:Invent sessions via RFC 1149 - IPoAC
• 60 (minutes) x 60 (seconds) x [ 32 (Mbps) / 8 (into MB) ] x 2 (multiple framerates) x 2204
(sessions) ~ 60.5TB
• Average 77.6 mph -> New York ~ 2500miles/ 77.6 ~ 32.2 hours
• SD card is 0.5 gram -> 1 pigeon can hold 75 grams -> 512GB+ -> 75TB+
(“Snowball” in the air  )
• Average US mobile network speed is 27.33Mbps DL, 8.63Mbps UL* - 364 hours just upload
Average US fixed broadband speed is 70.75Mbps DL, 27.64Mbps UL* - 91 hours just upload
• Some packet loss 

24. Thank you!
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Romeo Radanyi
Thomson Reuters
Kirk Kaiser
Datadog

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