Disney discusses private edge cloud at HPE DISCOVER event
Disney’s Director of Infrastructure Engineering, Jason Abrahamson, recently appeared at HPE’s Discover event to talk about deploying cloud at the edge. The entertainment giant appeared in the industry press recently after its Disney+ video streaming service nominated AWS as a preferred cloud provider, but on this occasion, the discussion was around private cloud and the edge.
For Disney, the edge means theme parks. Take Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, a 14 acre ‘themed area’; lighting control, advanced robotics, control systems and many other different elements need to work together seamlessly and in real-time. Delivering the resources required from a public cloud wouldn’t be possible. Similarly for Disney’s Cast members who operate the parks.
“Nothing is more frustrating than when they are unable to access a resource they need,” Abrahamson remarked.
Disney has no one cloud fits all strategy, rather a ‘right tool for the right job’ approach. For Disney+, that might mean the machine learning and analytics capabilities of AWS, but for the edge, where resources need to be close to the business, private cloud is the preferred option. For that, Disney uses HPE’s Synergy composable infrastructure which pools resources such as compute, storage and networking using VMWare’s vSphere/vSAN and NSX.
Private cloud at the edge makes sense but it’s not mandated across the whole business. The theme parks are a special case with special requirements.
“We have a massive application portfolio and we have to develop applications from the ground up more often than we would like to admit. Private cloud allows us to take public cloud flexibility and scalability but bring those features close to the business,” said Abrahamson.
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Article Topics
AWS | Disney | edge analytics | edge cloud | HPE | private cloud
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