Tempus Ex Processes Live Video for Professional Football at 40x Speed in Hybrid Solution Using Amazon ECS Anywhere

Sports technology company Tempus Ex Machina (Tempus Ex) manages live video on game days for sports league and broadcasting customers such as American professional football. The company needed a simple way to deploy its solutions on specialized on-premises hardware without increasing the complexity of its workflows. Tempus Ex was already using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its cloud deployments and wanted to find a hybrid solution to implement in a similar way on premises. Using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Anywhere, which lets users run and manage container workloads on customer managed infrastructure, Tempus Ex deployed its workloads to specialized on-premises hardware to process and transcode high-resolution video 40 times faster without additional complexity and at a lower cost.

To achieve high-speed video processing and transcoding capabilities for customers, Tempus Ex needed robust hardware. “We work with ultra-high-resolution video—8K and above and there’s not a lot of hardware that can handle that very well,” says Chris Brown, chief technology officer (CTO) at Tempus Ex. Tempus Ex purchased specialized hardware to manage video transcoding on premises, and the company looked into a hybrid infrastructure to incorporate this hardware while continuing to run most of its solution on AWS.

In May 2021, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon ECS Anywhere. “We immediately saw the value and started working toward using it in our on-premises infrastructure,” says Brown. Using Amazon ECS Anywhere, Tempus Ex can use the same infrastructure-as-code templates that it was already running in the cloud to run its on-premises deployment. The on-premises Amazon ECS Anywhere clusters use AWS Direct Connect—a service that creates a dedicated network connection to AWS—to create a fast, reliable connection to the company’s cloud clusters, which delegate work to the on premises clusters.

Since implementing Amazon ECS Anywhere to facilitate deployments on its specialized hardware, Tempus Ex’s workloads are transcoded 40 times faster than the previous processing speeds. The hardware also provides increases in the compatible codecs and resolutions that Tempus Ex can process. “Using Amazon ECS Anywhere saves us time and improves our workflow because we can use the same hardware in the cloud or on our local machines,” says Brown.

Using Amazon ECS Anywhere, Tempus Ex can manage both hybrid and cloud deployments with a small team. For its cloud deployments, Tempus Ex uses Amazon ECS, a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it simple for users to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications. The company can deploy the same infrastructure on its on-premises hardware using Amazon ECS Anywhere without adding manual processes or other complexities. “We’re a startup,” says Brown. “We wanted a solution that we could use while staying lean.”