Problem addressed

Online buying of multimedia content, like movies and audio, is common use today. Mostly this is done through stores. But these are rather limited. Search facilities for the user are limited to key words or simple browsing; moreover, tags manually assigned to contents are often not reliable, thus further impairing the precision of search results. While Query by Humming technologies are being successfully used in some music marketplaces, Query By Image Content technologies (used for instance in many simple free reverse image search engines) haven't been widely applied yet for improving the internal searches of Multimedia Marketplaces, in particular for videos.

From the multimedia providers' standpoint - regardless the existence of advanced content search services offered to their customers or not - the problems to be addressed in the application deployment concern scalability, elasticity, performance, security, and reliability. Deploying a multimedia service on the cloud is a clever option in order to satisfy the need of elastic and scalable resources, and together it also offers all the benefits of a pay per use model (no investments on infrastructure), but current cloud IaaS aren't a solid solution for other critical issues: reliability of the storage and of the running instances, overall security of the infrastructure, and quality of service..

Finally, a dynamic multimedia market place can interact with Content providers, offering pure multimedia contents, and Technology providers, offering adaptation and transformation services. While Content providers need trustable storage infrastructures to preserve their data, because their business comes from the commercial value of the contents they sell, Technology Providers need most of all computing power, so their major requirements are for elasticity, CPU performance and quality of service.

Contrail solution

Contrail technology enables the implementation of a dynamic multimedia market place. It will use the Contrail Federation components to allow Content and Technology providers to interact with each others' offerings, providing aggregated and focused content to a user. Contrail XtreemFS will assure the availability of content for all the providers involved. Reliability of applications will be guaranteed by ConPaaS and VEP.

These aspects, and more, will be negotiated and enforced by a SLA component. Contrail technology wil also be used to implement more advanced and refined search methods for the users, in particular MapReduce will be used by the data mining component responsible for content proposition purposes and VEP will support the scalability needed for demanding software in computational terms, such as face recognition processes inside videos.

The multimedia market place needs to be elastic and scalable. The market place is expected to grow. This requires an automatic scalability of all its services and components. Contrail PaaS can enable platform elasticity. The Marketplace and the technology providers can use elastic MapReduce services.

Contrail allows a real dynamic market place to be put in place at lower costs. It will allow multimedia technology providers to sell their services immediately without the need to invest in development of final products accessible by end users.

Similarly, content providers will be able to focus on their core business (contents), preserving their data in reliable storage services. Reliability will involve not only storage but also virtual machines, and proper SLAs will allow enforcing this important requirement for all the providers.

In the real production scenario, almost all critical aspects of the technology developed by the Project have been tested under heavy load conditions, and information on performance, scalability, security, and usability issues has been collected and reported so that corrective actions and fine tuning of the Contrail framework can be accomplished.  The Multimedia Marketplace has been chosen as the "Demonstrator".

A Demonstrator Environment has been set up and linked from the Contrail public portal, where interested users can find relevant information, run the Demonstrator Use Case and fill in an online questionnaire regarding quality evaluation, thus giving chance to collect feedback from early adopters, in general from all people, including Content and Technology Providers for the selected Use Case, that have access to the environment and can participate in installing, configuring, deploying Contrail components.

Benefits of using Contrail

There are several benefits for using Contrail in this case. Resiliency and distribution of multimedia contents spread through different clouds will be easily managed and enhanced with the use of XtreemFS features.

Protection of data is guaranteed not only by (QoP) rules, but also because  all data channels are encrypted to preserve confidentiality, with the ability to enforce location on users' data, thus satisfying legal constraints on data storage, such as geographical location.


Finally, this solution enables interoperation of Contrail clouds with OpenStack based clouds, which is a de-facto standard worldwide with thousands of working instances, in this way providers that already manage OpenStack infrastructures can easily join the Contrail federation.