New Year, New Data

by Canonical on 6 January 2016

Happy New Year, everybody! I hope everyone had a chance to take a break over the holiday season. At Canonical, we generally take a break the last week of the year. It gave me a chance to catch up on some shows I’d recorded to watch later. Upon returning to our duties this week, we were talking internally about DVR services and the demands they place on modern cloud infrastructures. I started thinking about all the different formats being delivered.

Modern content providers are being asked to deliver a multitude of resolutions of an increasingly varied catalogue of content. Much of the transcoding, content storage, and content delivery has traditionally been done with application-specific systems, solutions, and infrastructure. But, as the content formats become more diverse, and the catalogues of available, on-demand content grows, it’s no longer viable to maintain a separate, individual system for each format and function.

Content providers, including media, cable, and telco companies are turning to OpenStack-based cloud solutions to quickly process whatever is needed, and then repurpose the compute power to the next request. They’re leveraging dynamic modeling and deployment tools like Juju to make this rapid transition from one process to a completely different process absolutely seamless. At Canonical, we’re working with every one of these provider types, and more, to store, transcode, manage, and deliver all the modern content that we enjoy in our homes.

Managing all the content is a difficult, functional task that’s handled with aplomb with the Charms available in the Juju Charms Store. Monetizing the solution is often done with analysis and metrics of the content utilisation, user interaction, and real-time analytics, among other methods all derived from big data. We share strategies, specific applications, and real world use-cases telcos and content delivery organizations can use to monetize their big data environments in our eBook, Analytics and Big Data, Flexible Solutions for Evolving Telcos.

I’ve mentioned before, but I think it’s worth mentioning again, we’ve published more than one eBook on the topic of big data, the aforementioned and Big Data, Explained, Analysed, Solved, which explains the basics and the benefits of big data.

If you work with content, media, big data, massive amounts of on-demand user interactions, it’s worth it to have a read of our big data eBooks. Please reach out to us to learn more about Canonical’s unique, robust approach to reducing time to solution and maximizing your return on new solutions. Think of it as a New Year’s resolution to minimize overhead and increase returns.