Broadcast in the Cloud - My 2015 AWS Journey

In this special bonus episode, Ben teams up with co-hosts ChAIse and AIva to take us back to 2015 - a pivotal year when "broadcast in the cloud" was still a radical concept. This personal journey began with a client migration project and led to an intensive deep-dive into AWS certification that would shape his consulting career.


🎯 The 2015 Landscape:

• When Fox, Sky, and Discovery were just exploring cloud as "IaaS"
• Major broadcasters delivering 152PB of content per year while questioning cloud reliability
• Industry hesitation: "Can we trust the cloud when even Amazon.com goes down?"
• The birth of live TV streaming with RTMP endpoints and early Wowza partnerships
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🚀 Ben's AWS Certification Journey:


✅ From AWSome Day workshops at Kings Place to hands-on Lambda labs


✅ Chef workflows and infrastructure as code methodologies


✅ Real client work: playout migrations and live NFL cloud operations


✅ The intense study regime: QwikLabs, exam simulators, and £1,125 workshops


✅ Technical deep-dives: EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, and the complexities of VPC networking






📊 Industry Reality Check:


Ben documents the actual conversations happening in 2015 - from production services teams expressing caution about cloud reliability, to the economics of being vendor partners' "1st or 2nd customer" to make cloud financially viable.


🔍 Technical Insights:

• Early cloud transcoding solutions and broadcast partnerships
• The emergence of DevOps practices in broadcast with Chef cookbooks
• Real-world AWS architecture challenges and solutions
• Why penetration testing required alerting AWS beforehand
•


💡 The Transformation:


This episode captures the moment when traditional broadcast infrastructure began its cloud evolution. Ben's personal journey from skeptical consultant to AWS Solutions Architect Associate mirrors the industry's own transformation - how tough the exam was and the determination to master new paradigms.


🎬 For Today's Context:Essential background for understanding how we arrived at today's AI-driven broadcast landscape. The cloud migration lessons from 2015 directly inform current AI adoption strategies and infrastructure decisions.


From whiteboarding sessions at WeWork to late-night study sessions with Qwiklabs, this is the untold story of how one consultant embraced the cloud revolution that would define the next decade of broadcast technology.


📚 Episode includes actual notes and documentation from the 2015 journey - a time capsule of broadcast technology transformation.


More insights at Ancast.tv | Part of the ongoing Broadcast Media transformation series