AWS recently launched the on-premise AWS Elemental Link app. Customers can install this application in their own on-premise data centers to move large amounts of video to the media encoding and distribution environment MediaLive. The public cloud provider will also launch a new storage tier related to Elemental Link.
AWS is of course known for its public cloud solutions and applications, but also offers specific hardware for on-premise data centers. This hardware should facilitate access to and use of the public cloud environment.
Examples of this specific on-premise hardware are Outposts, dedicated servers that are physically managed on-premise and run a subset of AWS services. These services include EC2 mobile phones, EBS block storage, container services, relational databases, analytics and soon perhaps S3 storage.
Recently, an update was presented of the AWS Snowball Edge device for the execution of edge computing workloads and the migration of data to the public cloud environment.
AWS Elemental Link
The newly launched hardware application AWS Elemental Link is managed from the cloud and should simplify the transfer of video to MediaLive. According to the tech giant, the device only needs a video source, an Ethernet connection and electricity to work. Elemental Link is pre-configured with details of users’ MediaLive accounts. Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) is also supported, so only two cables are sufficient.
Three Elemental Link devices fit into a single 1U slot for a standard 19″ rack for easy deployment in an existing data center environment. One AWS Elemental Link costs $995 each.
New storage tier for video content
AWS Elemental Link will also be accompanied by a new specific storage tier. This special storage tier Elemental Media Store Infrequent Access is designed to allow customers to store cheaper video when demand for these images decreases.
This could be useful in e.g. a scenario where more expensive storage is used for live streaming, before the content is moved to a lower tier for less-viewed content. When the content disappears to the so-called ‘long tail’ phase, Infrequent Access storage can be used. The tier for that is in that case Elemental Media Store Infrequent Access.
The new storage tier of AWS has a price of 0,0125 dollar cents per GB. This is lower than the 0,0023 dollar cents that AWS now charges for its Standard storage tier.
6 hours ago
