Do you feel it is time to start considering how to be less dependent on one single provider of cloud web services for your solution but don’t know how or where to start?
In this article we give you a starting point by describing how to move the message queue service in your solution to a service based on open source instead. With a service based on open source you can at a later step move this to your own infrastructure.
Open source as a service
The SmoothMQ project is a message queue that is a drop-in-replacement for SQS. It is open source and there is nothing preventing you from hosting it in your own private or public cloud infrastructure. To reduce the barrier to move to a solution based on SmoothMQ and open source in general we developed Eyevinn Open Source Cloud. A service where open source projects are made available as a service, an open web service, and SmoothMQ is one of those.
This makes it possible for you to start shifting your messaging over to open source message queues without having to build up a self-hosting infrastructure for it first.
Feasibility study with open web service
Start with a practical feasibility study in the form of a proof-of-concept by taking a part of the workloads that your current web service handles and place it on a SmoothMQ open service. Develop an adapter that consumes messages from your current web service queue and place it on a SmoothMQ instance in Eyevinn Open Source Cloud. This adapter can be deployed and running as a Web Runner. Then have some of your workers to consume work from the SmoothMQ message queue. This gives you the opportunity to validate, identify gaps and estimate the effort to make the move without having to invest time and money in building up your own infrastructure first.
By now you should have the necessary information to scope and initiate a transition project.
The transition project can use the same approach by off-loading some of the workloads from your current web service and shift it over to open web services. Gradually make the move under the comfort that you can always fall back to current web service if you discover any problems along the way. Also, you have not had to make any large up-front infrastructure investments before you know that everything will work.
Move from open web service to self-hosted infrastructure
When you are comfortable that the open source based solution works you can start the project to build up your own infrastructure for this. As the open web service is open source and not bound to either Eyevinn Open Source Cloud or its underlying infrastructure you can run the very same software in your infrastructure. What provider of cloud (or on-prem) infrastructure you choose is fully up to you.
No larger modifications to the open web service based solution would be necessary as it is the very same software running.
Stronger independence
Now you are in a stronger position as the video transcoding part of your media solution is not bound to one single vendor. To further strengthen your independent position, you can take on the next component of your solution where there might exist an open source equivalence and use the same approach.