Azure Media Services or simple Storage Account for video storage for STA

Question

We are developing a "multi tenant application" ( MTA ) on AZURE. In addition we develop " single tenant applications " (STA) for customers that utilise MTA data via a REST API end point ie so the STA can be hosted anywhere.

A specific STA uploads and stores video files. Security for these video files is important and 1xVideo 1xConcurrentUser most likely consumption use case. It not clear at this stage the user will consume the content by streaming or download.

QUESTIONS

1. Using Azure MEDIA SERVICES account/keys its easy to upload , store and download media content. What are the benefits of using MEDIA SERVICES over a standard Azure STORAGE ACCOUNT ? ? I understand MEDIA SERVICES use a STORAGE ACCOUNT.

2. Does isolating a STA into a new Azure subscription makes sense to isolate video related costs categorically ? the itemised bill contains 6000+ rows. Difficult to extract the relevant data for an STA each month. In theory a STA customer could in future take control of this account management and costs.

3. Is there a max number of CONTAINERS that can be added to a STORAGE ACCOUNT ?

4. Should the CONTAINER be of type PRIVATE to secure the content but still allow access for the STA?

Thank you

Answer 1

I will try to answer the first question:

Using Azure MEDIA SERVICES account/keys its easy to upload , store and download media content. What are the benefits of using MEDIA SERVICES over a standard Azure STORAGE ACCOUNT ? ? I understand MEDIA SERVICES use a STORAGE ACCOUNT.

Answer: Azure Media Services origin server is the IIS media service in the cloud. All video contents are stored in Azure Blob storage and there is a mapping between the media service and storage. There are many advantages of using media server rather than directly downloading from storage: (1) Media server has the intelligent to forward the right data fragment(right bitrate, time stamp) to your client efficiently. (2) our origin server dynamically package multiple bitrate MP4 from storage account into multiple streaming format (HLS, Smooth streaming and MPEGDASH), which get to played on various devices and platform. Hence, you save on the cost for encoding your video into multiple formats. (3) Our origin server supports live streaming.

I think this question goes into why we invent media server. I have a blog explains how video streaming works for your reference: http://mingfeiy.com/adaptive-streaming-video-streaming .

Answer 2

Scott,

1. Media Services is good if you're looking to accept incoming video and process it to serve in other formats or to leverage streaming media playback. Serving video directly out of an Azure Blob Storage Account is possible but it will not provide smooth streaming or transcoding (no streaming playback may mean stop / start of video for users with high latency connections).

2. I would advise against putting each STA into their own subscription. While it will give you a degree of control over the management of charging back usage to the STA user it will be a big overhead to manage. Your best bet would be to use an appropriate storage account / container setup to allow you track calls some other way and provide estimated costs. Don't forget that Azure is always changing and it may be that future features give you the ability to tag and track costs inside a subscription more effectively.

3. There is no limit on number of containers in a storage account. The limits are 50 storage accounts per subscription and a maximum of 500TB of storage per account. Storage and Subscription Limits are documented here: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/azure-subscription-service-limits/#storagelimits

4. You can use Shared Access Signatures to control access to Blobs in Azure Blob Storage. See here for how to create and use them: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/jj721951.aspx and here for guidance on setting permissions on Blob Storage containers: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/ee393343.aspx

HTH Simon.