In the revolutionary move, OTT platforms ushered people into an era of on-demand entertainment. With technology evolution, the likes of e-commerce started offering free on-demand services to reduce customer churn. Now users are addicted to the power of ordering their favorite whenever they want instead of waiting for it to stream on grumpy ole cable TV. Are you contemplating opportunities to create one such on-demand platform for your business? Is expansion to the entertainment segment a well-versed part of your growth strategy? If you answered with a yes, brace yourselves, today we are discussing how a Video-on-demand application can be built with AWS Amplify. 

VOD using AWS

is a platform that assists in the instant creation of a streaming platform. Amplify video is designed for applications that are built on the AWS Amplify ecosystem; which offers easier management of back-end infrastructure from the console used for Amplify projects.

What is AWS Amplify?

The prodigy, AWS Amplify is a set of standalone tools, which can be clubbed together or used on their own to build scalable applications and front-end web. The tool is powered by AWS and is of great help to both stack developers and front-end developers. The fact that these tools can be used in combination and separately makes it even more impactful.

Some of the top web framework supported by Amplify includes JavaScript, Angular, Next.js, React and other mobile platforms like iOS, Ionic and Android.

Building a Video On Demand Using AWS

To build an effective video on demand platform using AWS, the pre-required libraries include content management, video processing, content hosting, content delivery, and authorization. To build each of these requisites on your own will take hours and demands a great understanding of varied programming languages.

Amplify VOD simplifies the task by floating a prescriptive streaming architecture into your AWS account with great ease. The agile tool supports the easier creation of video-on-demand streaming platforms.

Let’s go through different steps involved in VOD creation with Amplify

All source files are converted into adaptive bitrate format, which is compatible with the end-user environment. AWS’s AWS Elemental MediaConvert is a unique tool that transcodes all source files and processes them well. Everything in Amplify tool is dependent upon how well Elemental MediaConvert works.

Using a content delivery network improves the delivery speed and ensures a quality experience for end-users. A content management system stores associated metadata and offer control over access to playback. It indexes available assets and serves the audience with all relevant content.

Step 1:

At the very first, we must install Amplify CLI and Amplify video plugin. One can use the npm commands mentioned here.

npm install -g @aws-amplify/cli

npm install amplify-category-video –g

As soon as the installation is done, it is required to create and move into a new director for the Amplify project.

mkdirAmplifyProject

cdAmplifyProject

Once you enter the project’s root directory, Amplify initialization command can be run.

amplifyinit

The above-mentioned code assists in making the local directory & it is where the Amplify project is saved. On implementation an S3 bucket is created for the available AWS account, it is where all the AWS CloudFormation templates are stored. The stored templates are used by Amplify to complete processes like resource deployment. In case AWS CLI is not available, one can complete additional configuration steps as prompted by the tool.

Step 2:

By now the Amplify project is all set and even deployed; the project is connected to the AWS account. You can start adding resources now. Amplify wrap when run creates designs in specified categories, which helps with the creation and effective management of resources in your Video-on-demand using AWS project.

Amplify video plugin can be leveraged as a tool to ensure support for additional categories. With additional video resources and by creating configurations through CLI, one can easily establish a CloudFormation template on the available local machine.

amplify video add

Step 3:

All the prompts will be executed to configure the available video resources. Select the video-on-demand feature and give it a name. On further steps, you are asked to select an encoding template. A set of pre-defined templates are available and you are required to select one of them. The user can also bring in their templates and give their tool a unique touch. At this instant, it is time to respond to prompts such as “Is this a production Environment?”; if you select “yes” here, all your resources will be configured to ensure deployment of a Cloud Front distribution in S3 origin, allowing you to add cache content on Amazon edge network.

Step 4:

By now all resources are built locally and deployed to ensure configuration completion. All the videos now need to be pushed through the configuration to AWS. Amplify Push is one command, which is used to push all videos. Amplify Status is the command used to monitor the state of your available resources.

As soon as the Push command is run, Cloud Formation deploys the available resources to the specified account to configure the Amplify. As soon as, all requisites are created and deployed effectively, the CLI will generate output along with the names of the provided input in the S3 bucket created by Amplify. The bucket is created to processing all videos in the pipeline.

Step 5:

Use case

There are certain variables which we need to set while building our application like Integration of test Runner services like Sauce Labs, Browserstack, etcFor this you need to fetch the user name & key from the build tool itself.

Also , there could be a chance where you need to run automation at one environment & don’t need to run the whole regression suite on it.

And many more.. As we…

Integrating git with AWS amplify

In my recent assignment, we as a team finalised AWS amplify to use as a scalable devops tool.

It took a lot for us a team to get ourself familiar with AWS Amplify, but as the world is evolving we tried our best to put the best of the tools we can add in our project.

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