Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90%
The move from a distributed microservices architecture to a monolith application helped achieve higher scale, resilience, and reduce costs.
Hasnain says:
There have been a few thousand takes on this piece already - ranging from “micro services are dead” to “wait Amazon teams are allowed to crap on their serverless product?”. Hot takes aside I found this to be a decent exploration of “make it work” and then “make it efficient”.
“Moving our service to a monolith reduced our infrastructure cost by over 90%. It also increased our scaling capabilities. Today, we’re able to handle thousands of streams and we still have capacity to scale the service even further. Moving the solution to Amazon EC2 and Amazon ECS also allowed us to use the Amazon EC2 compute saving plans that will help drive costs down even further.
Some decisions we’ve taken are not obvious but they resulted in significant improvements. For example, we replicated a computationally expensive media conversion process and placed it closer to the detectors. Whereas running media conversion once and caching its outcome might be considered to be a cheaper option, we found this not be a cost-effective approach.”
Posted on 2023-05-08T05:04:26+0000