Secure Hybrid Cloud Video Transport With Haivision and Microsoft Azure
Implementing fast delivery of live content requires low latency and at the same time a high level of security for data packets in a network. HAIVISION is known for enterprise video streaming solutions used in many industries that require reliable transmission of real-time content. It’s not just solutions for one industry, like entertainment and media, but also corporate data communications where video offers solutions to collaborate and share information quickly and in real time. Keynote presentations, conference meetings, live demos and televised talks are the type of content that need the lowest latency and reliable transport regardless of the underlying network. Deploying this system using a hybrid cloud architecture provides an efficient way to leverage existing public IP networks.
Let’s talk about enterprise content delivery. There are various solutions out there that have a hybrid cloud setup. The requirements for the enterprise is to be able to deliver content, whether during a teleconference, keynote speech or talk with the least or no packet loss. Latency must be kept to a minimum, even on unreliable networks like the public Internet.
A big player in the market for hybrid cloud solutions is Microsoft. In a hybrid cloud, you have the combination of a traditional data center and a cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). The data center is often located on premise, where the shooting is taking place. Microsoft provides the infrastructure for content delivery from their cloud network, with a worldwide distribution as a benefit. Streaming directly from the location is a difficult task when it comes to scaling. This is when the cloud becomes useful as a content distribution network for reaching a wider audience.
Microsoft Azure Media Services
Microsoft’s Azure provides media solutions for high-definition streaming video. Aside from streaming, this service provides encoding, data protection, content distribution and media playback. In this case, Azure provides the live streaming content through its distribution network from the Haivision equipment streams. This can then be viewed from various devices using a media player.
Haivision Media Gateway
Utilizing the cloud as an infrastructure as a distribution platform, is allowing the delivery of content to a larger audience. This addresses the challenge of streaming from an on premise data center to a more distributed cloud architecture. StreamSRT allows enabling low latency, secured and reliable contribution from any encoder to the Microsoft Azure cloud. Using SRT (Secure Reliable Transport), an open source video streaming protocol, developers can use Azure-based video processing workflows including Azure Media Services. This is what allows content to be distributed to a wider audience from the Azure cloud.
There are 2 components to StreamSRT, a desktop application and a native Azure application. The desktop application runs Windows and takes RTMP or TS streams and transmits them securely using the SRT protocol to the StreamSRT Gateway. The Azure application then receives the SRT streams and converts them to a choice of RTMP for Azure Media Services CDN delivery, TS for broadcast processing through the Azure cloud or SRT for performance delivery across the Internet to SRT-enabled endpoints. The use of hybrid cloud and local networks is the way for many organizations that already have their own networks in place. SRT provides the following:
-AES encryption
-Packet Loss Recovery
-End-to-End Network Statistics
-Firewall Traversal
From the looks of it, this is one way to develop an open source solution that is secure and cost cutting. It’s all part of a video stream workflow that performs encoding and decoding for a secure transport of video packets for content delivery. What makes this an effective solution is it’s reliability over a public IP network like the Internet. That way there is no need to use a separate network if there is an IP-based network like the Internet that is already available.
HAIVISION implements this with their Makito Encoders/Decoders and Media Gateway. It can run as a standalone device or on the cloud network. This allows enterprise networks to distribute high quality video over the Internet for video applications like conferencing, training and collaboration. This is one way to allow greater scaling to accommodate needs for content delivery to multiple sites and locations across the world.
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Information provided by Haivision during a demo invitation at NAB 2018 (Las Vegas).
