Serverless Architecture… what’s the point?

What is Serverless Architecture?

Serverless architecture, cloud services, cloud-native, big data, are all
terms that have been thrown around over the last few years. With claims of
faster speeds, better security and overall improvement in your business
processes!

In simple terms, we will break down what being “serverless” means to us and,
more importantly, what it means for you when you’re using serverless
platforms.

Before “serverless”, there was just “server storage”, which meant that
businesses and enterprises kept their files, images, videos, systems on
physical servers. There were sorted in server rooms on-site at the business
premise or in designated buildings near your business locations.

With serverless architecture, your assets are stored in cloud servers
managed and owned by a cloud service provider such as AWS (Amazon Web
Services). This allows you and your team to access your files from anywhere
in the world, quickly and securely.

How does Overcast use Serverless Architecture?

The Overcast platform is built cloud-native and serverless. It consists of a
number of microservices – a major differentiator in the video asset
management market. Overcast is a proud member of the
AWS partner network.
Overcast also deploys a suite of AWS Elemental services,
including MediaConvert, MediaPackage and
MediaLive.

We use
AWS services
to:
– Transcode your content into any format you require.
–
Storing your content with fast upload and download tools.
– Build our
platform to be as

What are the benefits of being Serverless?

Business Benefits

Quick deployment

Doing business in today’s constantly changing environment means that
enterprises need to move fast and be agile to take advantage of
opportunities as they appear. Adopting a serverless architecture streamlines
the setup process and allows you to deploy new projects quickly.

Easy scalability

Serverless platforms enable businesses to quickly scale up services as
demand grows as they are not limited by server capacity. At Overcast, you
can store an unlimited amount of content but only pay for what you’re
currently planning on using. It also means that increasing your capacity by
1TB, 5TB, 100TB is as simple as one request to our technical team!

Better user experience

User experience (UX) greatly benefits from serverless architecture. By the
nature of serverless platforms, there is no distance between the different
“serverless” servers. This reduces the latency between them interacting with
each other. This translates to a much faster and reactive experience for the
final user.

Cost Benefits

Efficiency

It’s also possible to drastically reduce infrastructure and operational
costs because you don’t have to maintain and service physical servers. One
of the key benefits of serverless architecture is that you don’t have to pay
for idle resources, which you would if you owned the servers yourself.

Accurate resourcing

Serverless models like Overcast also allow you to monitor usage in
real-time. This will enable you to tailor your use with your business
requirements. This greater level of transparency will enable you to monitor
your spending and improve the accuracy of budgets and resource allocation.

Environmental Benefits

If you have environmental goals on the cards, you’re in luck! The data
centres are built at scale to be energy efficient to achieve optimal
utilisation and temperature. This leads to fewer carbon emissions than
traditional data centres.

Another drawback to traditional data centres is the constant waste of
resources while the servers are idle. Serverless computing becomes a
solution to this matter by running on-demand.

Bottom Line – how Serverless helps you?

• Cost savings
• Increased agility and instant scalability
• Faster recall of assets
• More reactive UI for all users

Overcast:

Overcast HQ provides a white-label, fully intuitive User Interface (UI) to
allow operational staff to exploit the power of the solution and the
underlying serverless cloud infrastructure.

We deliver media pipeline management solutions configured
to optimise existing video tech stacks, optimise complex video workflows,
and allow all stakeholders (not just editors and engineers) to manage video
content. 

Our platform allows customers to collaborate, search, review & approve,
transcode and therefore spend up to 90% less time managing content. We
are one of the very few solution providers built post-2015 to be able to
take advantage of the latest suite of cloud-native, serverless technologies.

We’d be delighted to talk you through all of this, so please feel free to
reach out to our CEO Philippe Brodeur on info@overcasthq.com or click here to contact us to find out how Video Content-As-A-Service will save you time and
money while increasing revenue opportunities.