The Simple Story of Amazon Prime Video’s Bold Transition From Microservices to a Monolith Architecture

kirill ibrahim
3 min readMay 27, 2023

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Prime Video is a service that offers thousands of live video streams to customers. They wanted to make sure that customers could watch videos without any problems. To do that, they created a tool to check the quality of the videos. The tool would automatically find any issues like blurry images or problems with the sound and fix them.

The team at Prime Video had a tool for checking video quality, but it wasn’t designed to handle a lot of videos at once. It was also costing them a lot of money to run. So, they decided to make some changes to fix these problems.

They looked at how the tool was set up and found two big issues. First, the way different parts of the tool worked together was expensive. Second, when the tool passed videos between different parts, it took a lot of time and money.

To solve these problems, they changed the way the tool worked. They put all the parts of the tool into one process, which made things faster and cheaper. They also used special services from Amazon called Amazon EC2 and Amazon ECS to run the tool more efficiently.

The tool has three main parts. One part converts videos into smaller pieces for checking. Another part checks those pieces for any problems. And the third part controls how everything works together.

Before, the tool was set up as separate pieces that talked to each other. But that caused problems when a lot of people wanted to use the tool at the same time. So, they put all the pieces into one place and made them work together inside a computer. This made things smoother and allowed more people to use the tool.

Moving everything into one place also helped reduce costs. They didn’t have to store videos in a special place anymore, which saved money. They also found a way to use less data when passing videos between the different parts of the tool.

After making these changes, the tool became much cheaper to run and could handle many videos at once. It also allowed them to keep improving the service and make sure that customers can enjoy their videos without any issues.

So, Prime Video made some smart changes to their tool to save money and make it work better. Now, they can monitor all the videos that customers watch and make sure they look and sound great.

Conclusion:

The selection of the architecture is crucial and entirely dependent on the nature of the project. It is not advisable to choose a specific architecture simply because it is considered the best option. This was a mistake made by the Amazon Prime team in their project, and that’s about it. Best of luck. Peace.

For more explanation please read:

https://www.primevideotech.com/video-streaming/scaling-up-the-prime-video-audio-video-monitoring-service-and-reducing-costs-by-90?fbclid=IwAR0mJrLW7d-9P6Oa6tMl0oxW40UYpM81sTjVeR2ut0HBBKjt7kweiRaQjOE

https://adrianco.medium.com/so-many-bad-takes-what-is-there-to-learn-from-the-prime-video-microservices-to-monolith-story-4bd0970423d4

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kirill ibrahim
kirill ibrahim

Written by kirill ibrahim

I am a Web Front-End Engineer with 8 years of commercial experience working in various web-related roles. https://kirillibrahim.work/ My Twitter: @IbraKirill

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