Case
Digital UK/Freeview reinvented for the cloud
Success with Digital UK
Digital UK (now Everyone TV) chose Merapar to be their technology partner to re-envision their critical Freeview broadcast infrastructure as a cutting-edge cloud-native solution, using Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The challenge was to seamlessly combine on-premises and public cloud infrastructure, dynamically targeting micro-service containers to balance availability against cost. Plus, the broadcast availability had to live up to the expectations: a minimum 99.99% availability.
Solution
Broadcast availability expectations (at least 99.99%) and typical cloud provider availability (99.95%) are no longer incompatible, since the truly critical components are deployed on the on-premises infrastructure, whilst everything else runs in the public cloud.
Leveraging features only available in the cloud, Merapar designed and built an on-demand DR (Disaster Recovery) system that is online only when needed (and for regular automated testing), resulting in significant operational savings.
Results
Working in close collaboration with Digital UK and the BBC Engineering Operations team, Merapar combined licensed core components, open source tools and bespoke agile software development with modern UX and design principles. The result is a cost-effective solution optimised for existing business processes, built on an advanced architecture ready for future expansion.
Digital UK, which provides and operates the broadcast infrastructure for the UK’s Freeview DTT service, concluded a software services agreement with Merapar for the critical CSI (Central Service Information) system, which is operated by the BBC Engineering Operations team. The system provides channel management and EPG metadata processing, without which customer devices would not be able to discover channels or browse the EPG. The system allows individual channel owners and service providers to upload their schedule information, where it is verified and collated before being output as DVB Service Information (DVB SI) for distribution over all multiplexes in the UK DTT network. It also handles real-time triggers from the playout systems to enable accurate PVR recording.
The Merapar solution uses leading open source projects – including Docker, Kubernetes, Angular, Spring Framework, Cassandra, RabbitMQ and Prometheus – to deliver advanced functionality quickly and on budget. All open source tools have been carefully vetted for quality, maturity, adoption level and community engagement, and Merapar contributes to the open source community whenever possible. Merapar specialises in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform, but by using abstraction layers can build cloud-agnostic solutions where independence is required. On top of Amazon EC2 we use Kubernetes with Docker engine.
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