Name
Continuous Deployment of CBC’s Media-over-IP Data Center
Date & Time
Wednesday, November 11, 2020, 1:00 AM - 1:30 AM
Timezone
UTC
Felix Poulin Alexandre Dugas
Description

CBC/Radio-Canada is putting the finishing touches to its new IP-based production center in Montréal. During the design and early deployment of this major facility, it became clear that we would need to automate and manage the staging and configuration of the thousands of media devices in a fashion similar to an IT data center. In fact, these new devices require thousands of parameters to be configured, and there are more frequent updates than for conventional devices. Moreover, once the system is put in production, business continuity imposes careful management of system changes in order to minimize the risk of technical regressions and human errors. The good news is that the IT industry has solved that problem in order to operate huge data centers that require high availability. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) practices have proven track records for operating data centers throughout their lifecycle, from configuration and provisioning, updates and changes, to sanity checks and monitoring. Tools such as DHCP, DNS, IPAM and configuration management tools are mature and widely used. This paper will present the architecture and implementation of CBC’s automated deployment workflow. We will cover requirements on endpoint devices and the technical and human-factor challenges we encountered during our journey putting in place the novel approach for the media facility. We believe these tools and methods will be applicable as a way forward to many media-over-IP projects at all scales.

Technical Depth of Presentation
intermediate to advanced
What Attendees will Benefit Most from this Presentation
Architects, system designers, implementers and operational managers of media over IP facilities.
Take-Aways from this Presentation
1- Real case implementation of a continuous deployment method and tools for Media over IP datacenter that can be applied to other projects 2- Lessons learned from an early major all-IP media facility 3- Practical examples of applications demonstrating the necessity to adopt methodologies matured in the IT sector in our professional media production industry.