Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Texas Governor Greg Abbott lifted the mask mandate and other anti-pandemic restrictions, defying warnings from health officials about the perils of dropping those precautions too soon.Effective March 10, all businesses will be allowed to open at full capacity, Abbott said during a media briefing in Lubbock on Tuesday. Although his executive order allows counties to reimpose anti-virus rules should hospitalizations surge, it forbids them from jailing or fining scofflaws.This will kill Texans, Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said in a statement. Our countrys infectious disease specialists have warned that we should not put our guard down even as we make progress towards vaccinations.Abbott acted at what federal authorities warn is a critical juncture in the pandemic that has killed 516,000 Americans: While hospitalizations and caseloads have dropped in Texas and nationwide, U.S. vaccinations are not yet widespread enough to provide so-called herd immunity, and new, easier-to-spread variants of Covid-19 are proliferating.Abbots move drew immediate criticism from Democrats while giving the Republican governor an opportunity to shift attention from the weather-induced blackouts that crippled the state two weeks ago. Texas deregulated electric market, a product of the states GOP leadership, is at the center of blame for the failures.Hard-Earned GroundThe announcement flies in the face of pleas by federal health officials for a continuation of masking and other anti-virus protocols.Abbotts anti-pandemic measures also have grated on his conservative electoral base, which saw them as government overreach, and may have wounded any presidential aspirations. He received 0% of the vote in a presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference this past weekend.At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said during a Monday briefing. Please stay strong in your conviction, continue wearing your well-fitted mask and taking the other public health prevention actions that we know work.Bidens WarningWalensky warned that a fourth wave of Covid-19 infections could be in the offing without continued vigilance. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden reinforced her admonition.I urge all Americans to please keep washing hands, stay socially distanced, wear masks, Biden said. Now is not the time to let our guard down.New Covid-19 cases in Texas dropped to a five-month low of 1,637 on Monday, state health department figures showed. Virus hospitalizations slipped to the smallest tally since Oct. 28.Too many Texans have been sidelined from employment opportunities; too many small-business owners have struggled to pay their bills, the governor said. It is now time to open Texas 100%.Earlier Tuesday, Abbott said in a tweet that Texas is administering more than 1 million Covid-19 vaccinations weekly.Texans have mastered the daily habits to avoid getting Covid, Abbott said.As of Sunday, none of the states 22 trauma-service areas had more than 15% of hospital capacity occupied by virus patients. The pandemic has claimed almost 43,000 Texans since it emerged in early 2020.An irresponsible decision guided by political expedience and nothing else, Houston City Controller Chris B. Brown said in a tweet. Not only will this set us back in the battle against #COVID19 in the region, it will likely prolong the economic pain brought on by the pandemic.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P.

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Form 8.3 - Willis Towers Watson plc - Yahoo Finance UK

It all starts with the cloud

The cloud stores your data, all your pictures and your phone contacts, and it processes information that helps make your favorite apps work. Cloud computing can do several things at once, really well: It can compute, store data and work with the network, all in one location. Many cloud providers, for example, have storage facilities that do cloud computing in locations all over the world. When you take a photo with your phone and send it to Instagram, it goes to a cloud facilitypossibly several hops and four or five states awaywhere all the necessary computing takes place, and then it publishes to Instagram. Its a similar process for reading your morning email or listening to a podcast. For things like that, the centralized cloud works really well, and the latency is low enough that your experience is just fine.

But certain experiences require a lot of data to move very quickly to and from a device and the cloud. Thats where MEC comes in. It brings the cloud closer to you.

The edge refers to the part of Verizons network that is closest to you: Your device connects to the network at the edge. And edge computing means bringing the cloud to the edge of the network closest to your device.

So how do you make edge computing more mobile, and closer to the devices that need it?

MEC is an entire network architecture that brings computing power close to any device thats using it. Instead of data going back and forth to cloud servers four or five states away, its processed just miles or meters from the device. For this purpose, Verizon has installed cloud servers in its own access points across its networks.

Read more:
The cloud without the wait: mobile edge computing and 5G - Verizon Communications

Today, people are talking more and more about cloud-native apps and cloud-native development. But what does this actually mean? Many applications are hosted on public cloud resources, but this alone doesnt mean theyre cloud-native.

A definition of cloud-native

A cloud-native app is one which has been designed solely for the cloud. This means cloud computing has been leveraged in every element of its design, which separates it from an application thats merely been lifted and shifted (moved onto cloud) or cloud enabled (partially built on cloud).

This more cloud-based design approach garners many benefits, incorporating the latest technologies and practices, such as DevOps, microservices and containers.

This approach is whats known as cloud-native development.

Elements of cloud-native development

DevOps

DevOpsis a delivery/development philosophy which holds that the ops and dev teams should be integrated for faster, more reliable developments.

In practice, this means utilizing cloud automation technologies to reduce manual work and guard against human error.

The end goal of DevOps is to reach continuous delivery/intergeneration (CI/CD), in which new features can be tested and deployed with minimal human input.

Microservices

Microservices is a cloud architecture approach in which applications are made up of many smaller cloud-based services. This is in contrast tomonolithic architectures, in which all elements of an application are hostedcentrally, andare generally inseparable.

Microservice applications are more costly to develop in the short run, but once achieved, offer far more flexibility and scaling options than their monolithic counterparts.

Serverless

Serverless applications are not, as the name suggests, wholly serverless. Instead, the applications requests are performed by servers provisioned on an on-demand/per request basis, as opposed to running on permanent cloud servers.

This comes with a host of benefits, including reduced latency, faster time to market, and lower cost of production completely bypassing the traditional costs of infrastructure provisioning.

Containers

Containerised applicationsrun off containers, which are a newer form of the traditional cloud server the VM.

Containers are much lighter than VMs in terms of required compute resources and are more environment agnostic, meaning they can be deployed on a greater range of infrastructures without undergoing change.

This means that, in many situations, containers offer increased flexibility and lower total cost.

Why cloud-native applications and cloud-native deployments will be key moving forward

Although some of the above cloud-native deployment methods are mutually exclusive, in general, these approaches confer many of the same advantages, which are already indispensable in todays competitive landscape.

Compared to traditionally designed applications and eventomany cloud-enabled or lifted and shifted applications cloud-native is:

More scalable

Soley cloud-based applications, and particularly microservice-based applications, can scale more easily. In the case of microservices, the ability to scale one service without scaling another is especially impactful, avoiding the costs of scaling all other elements in tandem, as would be the requirement for a monolithic application.

Easier to manage

Cloud-native infrastructure is more geared towards automation and reduced management costs. Serverless is the most obvious example of this trend, with applications being uploaded as functions only, and provisioning taken care of automatically.

Quicker pace of development

Cloud-native applications are better suited to DevOps, which seeks to automate testing, building and deployment. This in turn, of course leads, to shorter overall time to market.

More reliable

Many cloud-native technologiesare able tocope with faults far better than traditional technologies. Kubernetes one of the most widely used container orchestration tools automatically detects and heals non-functional clusters of containers.

Cloud-native technologies also allow faults to be more easily isolated.

Trends for the future

Increasingly, cloud-native is seen as the required benchmark for competitive development. And although many may cut corners with cloud-ready or cloud-enabled, the clear advantages of true cloud-native development and applications will ensure cloud-native becomes the norm in the years to come.

More here:
What is cloud native? - BusinessCloud

Media organisations are moving at different paces and there is no one size fits all technical approach. While some have already moved lock stock and barrel to the cloud, others face investment, training and technology dilemmas about how best to proceed.

Cloud is a one-way street and something broadcast CTOs have to embrace, says Baskar Subramanian, Co-founder, Amagi. Its a question of what to move and how fast.

The poster child for this is Discovery which began its wholesale move to AWS Cloud in 2016.

Previously wed have to buy a load of servers and install them, wed need a file transfer system, and we wouldnt know what the return on investment would be over time, explains Simon Farnsworth, CTO Broadcast Technology & Operations at an SDVI hosted webinar. Now, we can very accurately cost things like major new projects. It has become a lot less emotional and more binary since we can accurately predict cost.

He estimates Discoverys cloud-based supply chain has already saved the company $100m. Cloud is also claimed to have shaved $1bn in synergies from Discoverys 2018 acquisition of Scripps Networks.

Historically, [when Discovery entered] new territories we had siloed ops teams with siloed tech stacks and siloed workflows but were able to standardise that now, Farnsworth says. All the content for Discovery+ is in the cloud and its just a question of feeding it through to our own operated platforms or to affiliates. We need to be fast. What [cloud] has allowed us to do is generate the same amount of content while investing a truck load in new product.

Comcast Technology Solutions, perhaps the largest service provider in the world, is about to make a major acceleration in moving its own supply chain (though not yet including Sky) to the cloud.

We want to move into the cloud for flexibility and speed, explains Bart Spriester, VP and GM of Content and Streaming. To provide services to spin up and down and we need it to be usage based. We need to remove the integration lead time of on-prem solutions and remove capital approval cycles and slow software deployment.

In 2020 the company syndicated 66 million minutes of content to partners like Cox and Rogers and more than 170 affiliates. With this volume we need to take a lot of friction out of the system, Spriester says. We think there will be a huge benefit to moving this out to public cloud infrastructure.

The benefits of moving the supply chain to the cloud are clear. This includes the ability to build up and down rapidly and only pay for resources when required. Enterprise scale operations can be run with greater efficiency and accuracy than before.

Changing from a custom on-premises environment where different processes are done on different vendors kit to using common tools in an open source environment gives a much more consistent view of the operational state of the platform, explains Tony Jones, principal technologist, MediaKind. The way you build and configure systems is declarative meaning that you instruct system components what you state you want it to be and the system executes how to get there.

It is the deterministic behaviour of systems in a cloud environment that means broadcasters can predict with far greater certainty exactly what operating a service should cost.

Changing from a custom on-premises environment where different processes are done on different vendors kit to using common tools in an open source environment gives a much more consistent view of the operational state of the platform, Tony Jones,Mediakind

Add to that a microservices approach to development and deployment and broadcasters can upgrade equipment and introduce new features far faster, more economically and more flexibly than before.

If broadcasters want to have a healthy future in competition with SVOD vendors they have got to think along those lines, urges Jones.

One destination, many pathsThese arguments may be well known but getting there is not straightforward for the majority of broadcasters. In the negative column are cost, complexity and cultural inertia.

People are on different pathways, says Peter Sykes, Strategic Technology Development Manager at Sony Europe. At one end you have more traditional organisations making SDI to a IP as a first step while others are now moving to combine IP with cloud. Media companies know they have to reach new audiences but cant increase resources and in some case are having to reduce capital outlays.

This financial squeeze is one reason for a phased migration to cloud. Many broadcasters put their toe in first by moving disaster recovery operations. This has sped up since Covid-19 underlined the necessity for business continuity.

Another step might be to take less critical workflows like media processing and VOD to cloud. For others it makes sense to move complete sub-systems into a public cloud environment rather than a component-based approach. These systems are typically operated as-a-service by external providers.

They could move a complete broadcast chain encompassing playout, compression and multiplexing or ABR packaging as a one functional unit, Jones says. Theres not really any value to the broadcaster to build that themselves but if they choose to take it prepacked its an operationally easier environment and theres just one [vendor] to talk to if theres a problem.

The pace also differs depending on delivery technology. The traditional DTH anchor of broadcast delivery is moving slower than OTT DTC service launches which are more likely to be cloud deployments, says Richard Mansfield, MediaKinds Steaming Director. Broadcasters not ready to migrate their entire infrastructure are making this their first step.

Arguably, the biggest issue hindering broadcaster moves to the cloud surround skills and mindset.

The primary issue is cultural mindset more so than technology, says Subramanian. Its a question of being comfortable with a particular way of doing things and a reluctance to doing things differently.

Broadcasters used to plugging-in individual components using SDI or its IP version SMPTE 2110 face difficulties in working out how to apply that to the cloud.

Imagine you picked a handful of vendors, one of whom deploys into AWS virtual machines, one deploys into a Kubernetes environment and another one into a Kubernetes service in a cloud provider, posits Jones. How you integrate that as a complete system is a nightmare and probably beyond most broadcast engineers.

Not only do different vendor applications need to interface together but you also need to consider whether the deployment environment they work in are compatible with each other, he adds. A lot of legacy software apps that were built to run on premises have been adapted for the cloud but are not cloud native. There are no standards for this deployment. Its a wild west.

We have seen some big network operators that been able to grasp that change but it does take quite a big investment.

IT training neededRelated to this is the need for a whole new set of IT skills required of broadcast engineers.

Broadcasters launching OTT services in the cloud are often doing so using an IT team, says Mansfield. In the long run, this separation is insane. They are essentially doing the same thing as the broadcast team but delivering to a different output medium. To be successful those teams need to be merged together as one operation.

For Subramanian the answer lies in better education about the total ownership cost of cloud workloads. The finance team, the operations and tech departments are all used to a capex model which, when suddenly taken to opex-driven model, catches them off guard. In some senses the cloud complicates life because there are so many different pieces of the puzzle.

In one simple illustration, buying a server for on-premises versus putting a server on the cloud cannot be compared like for like. With the cloud model you need to consider the networking gear, the data centre, the air con power and performance, he says.

Aside from Kubernetes, which is an orchestration layer adopted by all major cloud platforms, Subramanian agrees that the internet is fracturing away from the broadcast safety net of unified standards. He doesnt think this a problem. There will be a plurality of standards that we all need to support including NDI, SRT, RIST and Zixi but this multiplicity breeds innovation.

Fundamentally what is missing from the whole ecosystem is better education to create business models. We have seen customers cross that bridge once they understand the significant benefits.

Somehow, Discovery seems to have done this. We managed to flip the [internal] conversation from finance looking at the bottom line to looking at metrics, explains Farnsworth. How much volume is flowing through? What is the reliability like? What is the cost so we can start delivering KPIs? Its a much more straightforward conversation and means we can concentrate on creating a better consumer experience rather than how we make it work technically.

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The complexities of moving to the cloud | Industry Trends | IBC - IBC365