Life in the Fast Lane

One of the key requests from our operational focus groups during the early design phase of BLAM-3 was the ability to prioritise workflows, particularly delivery workflows. Words to the effect As an operational supervisor I would like the ability to place assets in a fast lane for delivery were frequently heard. This became one of the key requirements of the BLAM Workflow Engine and has been developed into a sophisticated and highly configurable capability which enables operators to build Service Level Agreement (SLA) aware' workflows.

BLAM Workflows The BLAM Workflow Engine is the business process orchestration component of BLAM which manages all operations within the system as well as the user-definable workflows. Workflows are constructed by linking functional blocks called BLidgets (Blue Lucy widgets) in sequence, to deliver a specific capability. Each BLidget performs a particular function such as creating a checksum, watermarking an image or controlling 3rd party systems such as a cloud-based Quality Control service.

Workflows are built by connecting the individual BLidgets together to produce a sequence of operational steps which, when triggered, will be executed and managed by the engine. Workflows are easily built by simply dragging, configuring and connecting BLidgets on a visual canvas.

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A mid-level system administrator or business analyst is able build workflows without needing to create or understand the underlying code. The workflow builder has been designed to be entirely operator self-service, allowing media businesses to build their own workflows with ease. And crucially without the need to refer back to Blue Lucy or our integration partners.

Safety features are built in at the BLidget level to ensure that incorrectly configured workflows can do no harm to existing workflows or the wider platform. This encourages experimentation and a trial-and-error approach which enables media operators to respond quickly to new business needs essential in the increasingly dynamic, ever evolving consumer market.

Such is the versatility of BLAM that the number of workflows on any one system tends to grow rapidly, particularly for multi-tenant systems. At a certain point the question of workflow prioritisation is often considered.

Do Cloud Workflows Need Prioritisation? The elastic nature of the cloud' affords significant opportunity for scaling in the provision of the key functions of a content supply chain such as media format conversion (transcode), render, QC and delivery (transfer). In the context of the infinite scalability of the cloud is prioritisation even a requirement?

In reality there will be some queues and, although a properly configured management platform such as BLAM can all but eliminate these, some contention is inevitable particularly in the case of bulk migration projects. In addition, manual operations that require human resource, such as eyes on' QC, cannot be scaled so readily and on prem' deployments have physical constraints that need to be managed. With pressure to deliver ever more rapidly to an ever-increasing number of delivery channels, workflow prioritisation has probably never been more important.

Prioritisation in BLAM BLAM maintains individual queues for each functional service under management. For example, if an on prem' deployed BLAM is managing three connections to external cloud-based storage such as AWS S3, BLAM will manage a single queue for the upload to S3' function. If five asset files (named A - E) are running through different workflows at around the same time and all need be uploaded to S3, each will join the single upload to S3 queue. Without prioritisation the first three asset files, A - C, will be distributed as jobs to each of the available connections in the order in which they arrived on the queue. Asset file D will remain on the queue and is posted only when a connection becomes available - i.e. when the process for an

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