What Is Visual Cloud?
Visual cloud refers to a set of capabilities that enhance the production and delivery of visual experiences like cloud video streaming, graphics rendering, media analytics, cloud gaming, and immersive media.
By using hyperconverged infrastructure and acceleration technologies, the visual cloud accelerates visual applications throughout the network, from edge to core. It enhances the performance and efficiency of traditional video encoding and transcoding methods. It also speeds up visual experiences for which low latency and responsiveness are priorities.
This approach has several business advantages. For one, it can lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) of infrastructure by consolidating and optimizing resource usage. Also, it can help drive growth by allowing new services to be monetized.
As a result, this technology has been adopted by key players in the telecommunications industry—including communication service providers (CoSPs), cloud service providers (CSPs), internet service providers (ISPs), and colocation data centers—along with numerous media and entertainment companies, broadcasters, and visual media enterprises.
How Does Visual Cloud Work?
Visual cloud leverages a unified architecture that distributes visual workloads between cloud and edge resources. This unified infrastructure allows workloads to run at various locations within the network depending on the application’s needs. By assigning workloads to the right place, companies can accelerate visual applications and implement more-efficient strategies.
Workloads best served by cloud resources—including video transcoding, media streaming, and storage—remain in the cloud. Latency-sensitive and critical workloads—such as content delivery networks (CDNs), graphics rendering, video analytics, and immersive experiences—are processed in local and regional data centers or at base stations at the network edge, where they can be processed in real time. The result is a versatile network highly optimized for processing, analyzing, and delivering visual experiences.
Visual Cloud Components
A combination of hardware and software solutions goes into implementing a visual cloud and edge solution. They include:
- CPUs: Scalable processors with built-in accelerators power a wide range of visual cloud and edge workloads, including fast video encode/transcode for streaming video and broadcasting.
- Accelerators: Specialized hardware—including discrete GPUs, integrated GPUs, and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)—can boost performance for demanding graphics, analytics, and compression tasks.
- Ethernet: High-bandwidth connections are important for managing signal traffic and high-volume streaming content.
- Software-defined infrastructure: Virtualization enables the flexibility to alter or optimize functionality without changing the underlying hardware.
Benefits of Visual Cloud
Visual cloud and edge technologies help businesses stay ahead of the fast-growing demand for visual experiences. Here’s how:
- Scalability: Visual cloud and edge infrastructure allow resources to scale up and scale out as needed. Cloud computing provides resources that scale to meet transcoding and storage demands. Edge computing allows workloads to scale horizontally across multiple edge servers, providing the local resources to help keep network traffic flowing smoothly and to process low-latency workloads in near-real time.
- Flexibility: Workloads are balanced on available resources in the cloud and at the edge, giving enterprises the ability to support changing combinations of resource requirements for a variety of workloads and applications.
- High performance: Visual cloud and edge solutions are built from accelerated hardware—including integrated and discrete video accelerators—and optimized software, which improves performance and energy efficiency for encoding/transcoding tasks and analytics workloads.
- New revenue channels: Scalable, flexible, high-performance infrastructure allows businesses to adapt to evolving standards and swings in consumer demand. Enterprises can offer and monetize new services, including ones that require low latency and fast responsiveness.
Challenges of Visual Cloud
Some of the challenges that media companies face with visual cloud and edge deployments include:
- Rising costs: The shift to high-resolution compression standards comes with the added overhead of increased codec complexity. That equates to higher compute requirements, reduced server density, and increased CapEx and OpEx. Scalable visual cloud and edge processors help businesses optimize video processing functions to deliver cost-effective, next-generation visual media experiences.
- System integration: Organizations can struggle to effectively integrate modern infrastructure with legacy equipment, bare metal servers, and existing network services and workflows. Having an open, unified platform as a foundation helps to ensure interoperability and optimal performance.
- System management: Visual cloud and edge solutions can span cloud data centers, edge locations, and the network core. Cloud-style management platforms and tools are necessary for observability and centralized control, allowing IT staff to effectively manage resource use and application health throughout the environment.
Visual Cloud Use Cases
Visual cloud solutions enable advanced visual experiences with high performance, high scalability, and full hardware virtualization. They include:
Video Production
Cloud media solutions provide the compute resources and bandwidth to facilitate complex live video workflows for broadcasting. Multiple high-resolution video and high-quality audio streams can be managed, processed, converted to the correct format, and delivered cost-effectively in real time.
Media Processing
Cloud media and entertainment solutions support the ever-increasing demand for over-the-top (OTT) video streaming. Scalable processors power accelerated transcoding/encoding for improved video quality and responsiveness. Distributed resources help to enable the seamless delivery of video-on-demand (VOD) content, live streams, and user-created content to audiences at high resolutions and consistent frame rates.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
Running a CDN at the network edge improves performance with localized caching, dynamic load balancing, and autoscaling. A virtualized CDN (vCDN) makes the network more flexible by enhancing its capability to distribute requests among edge servers. This helps CSPs account for traffic from high-bandwidth applications, including ultrahigh-resolution VOD, large-scale live-streaming broadcasts, extended reality, cloud gaming, and more.
Video Analytics
A growing number of use cases rely on near-real-time video analytics to inform and automate business decisions. These include computer vision–based personalized shopper experiences and inventory management for retail, AI-based quality control in industrial settings, digital safety and monitoring for smart buildings, and more. These industries need access to low-latency edge computing services to keep their systems up and running.
Cloud Graphics
Visual cloud and edge solutions are adept at running hefty graphics-rendering workloads. That means CSPs and large enterprises can distribute graphical services such as 3D modeling software and support more virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) users. Scalable compute resources power high-performance virtualized environments, providing responsive user experiences.
Cloud Gaming
A mix of cloud and edge resources—including central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs)—provides the low-latency processing that makes cloud gaming possible, allowing cloud and network operators to deliver high-quality streaming gaming experiences to consumers.
Immersive Media
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) offer transformative experiences for consumers. Visual cloud and edge solutions help businesses create and deliver immersive experiences with optimized volumetric video capture, reduced latency, and increased bandwidth from edge to core.
The Future of Visual Cloud
Next-generation video codecs such as VVC (H.266) will usher in far more efficient video compression, enabling the next leap in high-fidelity visual experiences. Higher-resolution streaming, higher-resolution virtual reality, and ultrahigh-definition streaming content at resolutions of 8K and beyond are likely on the way, presenting growth opportunities in the visual experience creation and delivery spaces. Yet these advances will come at a premium, requiring significantly more compute resources.
To meet these increased demands, scalable, flexible, accelerated infrastructure will be an imperative. Stakeholders and decision-makers should start preparing today by developing a viable visual cloud and edge strategy and moving CDN workloads closer to consumers.