Pros and Cons of a Multi-Cloud Streaming Strategy

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Magnus Svensson: Should it be only one cloud vendor, or should it be multi-cloud agnostic? How was your experience there? Jeff, I know you're running in multiple clouds and then multiple instances. So, what's your multi-cloud experience?

Jeff Malkin: We operate in about 20 different cloud data centers data centers around the world, and to continue on Magnus's point, in our case, it's about being able to ingest and process content locally to any geography around the world. So you don't have to send content across the pond, et cetera. For speed and cost efficiencies, that's been great.

Multi-cloud is interesting. We have found in our experience that our largest clients are interested in Encoding.com being more than just Amazon Cloud-based. But often it's more political than it is technical--meaning, Amazon Prime is a competitor to a lot of our clients. And so that becomes an interesting ... I guess we all deal in that world, but from a technical perspective, we have had great success running on Amazon for many years.

We run on Azure, we run in our own data center, we run OpenStack, we run in several clients, private cloud implementations as well. A lot of it comes where you're storing your content--if you're storing in one cloud, you could still ingest it into the other. And in that case there's only the cost of egress and doing that. There's no cost of ingest into the other cloud. I think what we were all hoping in the market--and it is happening--was that the multi-cloud wars would cause pressure to reduce compute and storage and other value-added service costs. And I think that's a real value.

But from an individual customer perspective, we don't see a lot of requests that it's important that we operate in two different clouds. A lot of that comes down to redundancy, and what happens if a certain region in one cloud goes down, and we have a lot of systems in place to deal with that. Say, AWS east went down, for whatever reason. We'd be routing jobs to the next-nearest data center. And clients wouldn't even know that if they weren't going to our status page. So if you have redundancies in place, which I'm sure most do, then multi-cloud is really about economic pressure on driving prices down rather than an individual client saying "It's important to us that you operate in two different clouds."

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