Introduction
Table of contents
How this book is organized
This book is written in two largely independent parts.
The first part, “An Overview of Digital Media” is an overview of key concepts in digital and cloud-based media delivery. This section is to help individuals new to the world of digital media get a high level understanding of the key concepts of digital media. This section is not a deep dive into actual encoding technologies, and the systems and optimizations of digital encoding and transcoding: there is already an extensive library of those books available. The overview section seeks to introduce non-media architects to the most important concepts in digital media so they can understand the ideas being expressed by their media-centric colleagues. A seasoned media practitioner can safely skip the first part of the book and go directly to the second part.
The second part, “Google Cloud for Media” is for media and non-media architects who are looking to operate their digital media stacks in the cloud. This section introduces the key features of Google Cloud and the wider Google ecosystem that are important for media use cases.
The third part, “Media Architectures on Google Cloud”, goes into detail about how architectures build on Google Cloud assist in achieving specific outcomes for a wide variety of media use cases. In some ways, this is the most interesting section since the goal is to keep it continuously evolving with new solutions.
Open sourcing
This book initially started out as a short explainer for architects new to the media space. Over time, the document grew larger and longer as more information regarding media was added to it. Also, there were requests to share the document with customers.
With that in mind, it seemed that open sourcing the content was the best thing to do: it would allow the largest group of individuals to utilize the material, and it would remove all the complexity of access and acquisition. It seemed like the right thing to do.
Open Source License
Copyright 2022 Google LLC
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at
https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.