I was in Los Angeles this week for the Digital Media on AWS Summit and to visit many of the studios and production houses that are using AWS for production and post-production work. There is some real jaw dropping work being done around this town and I had the privilege to see some of these highly guarded secrets, all powered by AWS. Of the work that is already public the systems that Uplynk has built for Disney/ABC are impressive. The single source format approach has their customers very enthusiastic about how simple multi device stream is for them with Uplynk handling all the transcoding, dynamic ad-insertion, black out handling by switching from live to vod, etc. All the hard work is being done by them on AWS.

Today I am heading to India where in the coming two weeks I will be visiting customers. We will also have three AWS Summits with great content from Amazon Architects and from AWS customers; in Mumbai on September 25, in Chennai on September 28 and in Bangalore on October 4. More detail here

The back-to-basics paper for this weekend is the paper on Leases. It is a simple concept, originally introduced for handling cache consistency, but it is a technique you find back in many modern systems, for example those those that achieve consistency using lock servers.

Leases: An Efficient Fault-Tolerant Mechanism for Distributed File Cache Consistency, Cary G. Gray and David R. Cheriton, Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Priciples (SOSP), December 1989, Litchfield Park, AZ, USA.