With the pandemic pulling technology trends forwards by a decade or so, a procession of buzzwords have blossomed as a result. Microservices has been one of the most prominent of trends to climb the ranks of company priorities over the past year and is arguably the only broader technological transformation occurring right now that is capable of moving mountains in media and entertainment.
However, there is an assumption that wide adoption of microservices could decimate vendor communities, as customers seek best of breed alternatives to monolithic systems, which is a misconception that needs nipping in the bud. The opportunities for smaller vendors transitioning product portfolios to microservices are just as great as for the media conglomerates, operators, broadcasters, and internet heavyweights deploying microservices across their businesses.
An esteemed decisionmaker who agrees is Renard Jenkins, VP of Content Transmission and Production Technology at WarnerMedia. Jenkins’ attitude is that any vendor approaching him with a product or service that can solve a problem, without requiring his team to buy into a monolithic system, is probably going to keep his attention.
Chatting during a HPA Tech Retreat seminar session, Jenkins described a “wealth of opportunities” ahead for companies, if they are willing to take them.
Lego seems to be the go-to analogy for microservices. Just as Synamedia toyed with Lego during last week’s press conference, Jenkins also opted for the Danish construction sensation, describing how microservices are essentially small building blocks that allow you to build out highly complex workstreams and workflows.
We saw a bit of the Faultline spirit in the way Jenkins made long-term predictions about the technology, taking the microservices conversation to another level beyond what vendors dare to divulge.
He questioned what happens when you need to take a portion of a workflow into another space, such as another company, where it can be replicated? That would be impossible if this other location works without the same connective tissue, according to Jenkins, so in that sense you would need different building blocks. That is where microservices come in, and Jenkins wants to get to the point where you can easily replicate systems to be more efficient, and that does not necessarily mean doing away with customization altogether – making them just customized enough so that it makes life easy no matter what location you are.
This in turn brings opportunities for companies like WarnerMedia to not have to constantly work on base code, which has been a limitation of existing systems for a long time once the industry transitioned to more software-based production. Typically, a vendor delivers a customized version of a product to one customer, and another customized version of the same product to another customer, and so on, until the customization snowballs to the extent the technology supplier is unable to support all these different versions because it has been customized to oblivion.
Microservices allows the WarnerMedias of the world to say, “I need something custom, but in such a way that I don’t have to make everything custom” – which for Jenkins means he can add components to his base infrastructure when needed and remove them when he’s done. This represents a huge opportunity for vendors who are willing to pivot.
“I think companies are coming to the realization that microservices are necessary. No one is going all-in with a particular vendor now – everyone is looking at best of breed and looking at how to create software-defined workflows that allow me to utilize best of breed, so interoperability becomes not a nice to have, but a requirement,” continued Jenkins.
Mention of interoperability sent the discussion irreversibly into standards. Jenkins estimated it could be 2 to 3 years before standards around microservices emerge, while reassuring the HPA Tech Retreat audience that the OSA (Open Services Alliance) and SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) are working hard to decrease that timeframe, by putting in mechanisms to make standards processes faster without losing quality.
“People are coming out of the gate with all kinds of tools and options, but to work together, we need some kind of structure,” added Jenkins. He took aim at the individuals who question why standards are important, saying these are the types of people who have enjoyed easy rides with technology because standards just work away in the background making lives easier, helping push forward the distribution of content whether you are viewing on iOS or Android.
It was only November 2020 when the OSA and SMPTE revealed major progress towards creating the industry’s first two microservices standards – one for standardizing reporting and logging for media microservices, and another documenting a standardized IMF Registration API. We get the impression the two industry bodies are well ahead of schedule.
Jenkins is keen to quickly get beyond microservices as a buzzword to clear the way for discussions about the nitty gritty of what it takes to create real microservices. Just over the horizon, he sees a future of platform independency where it is still possible to create a clear, concise, and complete defined workflow, and that again is where microservices are key.
Thinking even bigger, Jenkins was visibly excited by the idea of applying microservices for use in machine learning, where you can begin to model based on a common ontology, dropping in microservices from different vendors, different coders, and different places, to create what he calls true software-defined workflows. For example, in the middle of a process you can have a decision mechanism that actually takes it off into a different plane – a different space – where a separate microservice is being used.
By this point in the chat, Jenkins is fizzing with enthusiasm about the possibilities of microservices making use of proper AI in the future. When the industry eventually gets there, he envisages defined workflows that will begin to think and make decisions based on what is modelled or what has been learned over time.
Microservices and machine learning working hand in hand, with best of breed interoperability all in one place, thanks to standards, is about how best we can summarize Jenkins’ utopia.
“Does that sound all a bit science fiction right now? Yeah, but that is the reality of what we can do, and – to be honest – if we put enough horsepower behind it, we could find groups that are already doing this. So, how do we adopt some of this knowledge and skillset for content creation, distribution and processing?” pondered Jenkins.