Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90%

https://www.primevideotech.com/video-streaming/scaling-up-th...

Marcin Kolny discusses how Amazon's Prime Video team revamped its video quality analysis (VQA) service to reduce costs and improve scalability. Initially, the VQA team used a distributed system consisting of several components, such as media conversion, defect detectors, and orchestration management.

The team re-architected the infrastructure, packing all components into a single process to eliminate the need for intermediate storage for video frames.
The new infrastructure allowed the team to rely on scalable Amazon EC2 and Amazon ECS instances for deployment, resulting in cost savings.
VQA initially used serverless microservices components, which raised scaling bottlenecks of 5% and cost concerns.
To address these, VQA moved to a monolithic system, lowering infrastructure costs by more than 90% and increasing its scaling capabilities.
In the new system, video frames are transferred in-memory, eliminating the need for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) as intermediate storage for video frames.
This model also allowed VQA to monitor all live streams in real-time, resulting in a better customer experience.
The shift to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) also allowed Prime Video to use Amazon EC2 compute-saving plans that lowered costs even further.