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Respecting What Came Before, Premature Optimization, the Pitfalls of Sensationalism and Technology Enthusiasm
My response to the reaction generated by the Prime Video article published last week
“Life is not always perfect. Like a road, it has many bends, ups and down, but that’s its beauty.” ― Amit Ray
Every now and then, the internet goes crazy over something someone said, did, or thought. Last week, it was an article from the Video Quality Analysis (VQA) team at Prime Video about the architecture evolution of their specialized live stream monitoring service. One of the hundreds of services that powers Prime Video.
The article talks about the architectural evolution of a tool developed by VQA for audio/video quality inspection. That tool, never intended nor designed to run at high scale, was now required to meticulously track all the live streams going to customers and automatically detect and address perceptual quality issues such as block corruption or audio/video synchronization problems.
This important detail easily missed from the article indicates that the architectural evolution was triggered by a change of requirements. A tool never originally designed or built for live monitoring was now being required to monitor all the live streams going to customers. In other words, the requirement went from asking an offline software architecture to now work in live mode.
That is a rather dramatic change of requirements.
The article also explains that the initial version of that tool was built using a Serverless-First approach, allowing the team to quickly explore and test their ideas.
A little but important detail: Prime Video Live serves millions of users for high-profile events such as The Grand Tour and Thursday Night Football, as well as exclusive streaming of the English Premier League.
With the added complexity of live events and popular streaming premieres, this monitoring…
