How BAMTECH Media Delivers 50,000 Live Events via APIs

"As key players in the OTT market, BAMTech Media distributes over 50,000 live events annually. As BAM continues to add more partners and deliver larger events, Akamai technology and team have become an integral part of BAM’s delivery process. Leveraging the latest Akamai APIs, a template-driven provisioning process and iterative configuration enhancements, BAM is able to deliver an optimized experience to the end user on a consistent basis by employing the concept of a """"Golden Configuration.""""

The goal of this session is to explore, the critical factors which enable BAM to deliver direct-to-consumer live streaming services at scale for a growing roster of sports, news, and entertainment partners. Our focus will revolve around two key success factors instrumental in scaling of BAM live events and evolution of their cloud strategy for streaming. Those factors are:

* Standardization (through development of BAM “Golden” Config)
* API Provisioning (Akamai configurations & workflows)

We’ll take you through the actual Akamai delivery rules & variables used; even walk you through the custom tools we built as part of a live demo."

Transcript

1. © AKAMAI - EDGE 2017 How BAMTECH Media Delivers 50,000 Live Events via APIs
2. © AKAMAI - EDGE 2017 Who Is BAMTECH Media? • Formerly a part of Major League Baseball Advanced Media • BAMTECH Media is a global leader in direct-to-consumer streaming technology and marketing services, data analytics, and commerce management • Partners & Clients:
3. © AKAMAI - EDGE 2017 How We Used To Do Things • Individual Configurations Per Property • Doesn’t Scale at 1,000s of Configurations • Basic Akamai Delivery Products were leveraged • Specific features were lacking • Lots of Custom Metadata • Limited standardization outside of hostnames • Iterative Approach without “Renew/Refresh” • Clone ”last best” and move on to the next config
4. © AKAMAI - EDGE 2017 What Did We Learn? • Benefits • Allowed configurations to be individualized • Rapid implementation process • Iterated on what worked • Challenges • Reactive methodology • Self Service options limited because everything was bespoke • Problems were tougher to diagnosis and implement across the board • Relied on spreadsheet to track config inventory & optimizations
5. © AKAMAI - EDGE 2017 How Do We Do Things Now? Features Product Content Characteristics Origin Characteristics Tiered Distribution Geographic Characteristics Advanced Overrides Security • “The Golden Configuration”
6. © AKAMAI - EDGE 2017 How Do We Do Things Now? • WHITEBOARD
7. © AKAMAI - EDGE 2017 How Do We Do Things Now? • WHITEBOARD
8. © AKAMAI - EDGE 2017 What Are The Results? • Benefits • Scalable • Single Source of Truth • Organizational Improvement • Months Ahead on Implementations because we know our Golden Configuration “just works” • Rather than Customize Options • Variables to the Template • Update the Template not an Individual Config • No work doesn’t go to the iterative process • Solved Long Standing Issues • Excessive Requests to Origin • Standard Tokenization Schema with Varied Options
9. © AKAMAI - EDGE 2017 Deep Dive – Excessive Request to Origin • Why Does It Happen? • How Did We Solve It? • Collaborative Approach • Open Back and Forth with Support and Engineering • Detailed Documentation Shared Between Both Teams • Specifics • AK Path • Forward Serial Hash
10. © AKAMAI - EDGE 2017 Deep Dive – Excessive Request to Origin • Results •Original - 2.5 Tbps Peak Bandwidth Event -> 18 Gbps at Origin •Optimized - 2.5 Tbps Peak Bandwidth Event -> 300 Mbps at Origin
11. © AKAMAI - EDGE 2017 Now What? – APIs! • Golden Configuration As The Baseline • Property Manager APIs (PAPI) • Python Script • Run in CLI • Flags Enabled Different Options • Self Service throughout Infrastructure Team • All Based on Standard Template • Autopushed to staging
12. © AKAMAI - EDGE 2017 API Demo • DEMO
13. © AKAMAI - EDGE 2017 Want More? •John Councilman presenting on the specifics of the PAPI API in your own language of choice •How You can Leverage this code and organizational concepts
14. © AKAMAI - EDGE 2017