OpenStack Summit November 2014 Paris

RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana), Italy's national public broadcasting company, has to deal with the growing cost for new storage hungry media formats (e.g., 4K UHDTV), while also enabling its employees to collaborate and manage content across geographically separated sites throughout the media production cycle. To address these needs, we have integrated Docker with Swift via a generic mechanism we call "storlets". Integrating Docker with Swift keeps the storage cost low as well as co-locating compute to avoid costly network transfer for a wide range of media workflows. In this talk we will present the problem RAI is solving including its requirements, present the storlet mechanism, demonstrate how storlets can be used for media workflows and other scenarios, and place our work in the context of other efforts.