Part 3: Building a scalable 'shot-based' serverless AV1 video encoder in Azure

This is a 3-part blog covering how to build a scalable shot-based serverless video encoder in Azure. In Part 1, I explain what AV1 is and where we are in the video encoding space. In part 2, we create a logic app to upload and index the video. In part 3, we’ll need to split the video into its scenes and encode individual scenes. For reference, here are the links to all the parts:...

September 26, 2019 · 7 min · Kay Singh

Part 2: Building a scalable 'shot-based' serverless AV1 video encoder in Azure

This is a 3-part blog covering how to build a scalable shot-based serverless video encoder in Azure. In Part 1, I explain what AV1 is and where we are in the video encoding space. In part 2, we create a logic app to upload and index the video. In part 3, we’ll need to split the video into its scenes and encode individual scenes. For reference, here are the links to all the parts:...

August 1, 2019 · 7 min · Kay Singh

Part 1: Building a scalable 'shot-based' serverless AV1 video encoder in Azure

This is a 3-part blog covering how to build a scalable shot-based serverless video encoder in Azure. In Part 1, I explain what AV1 is and where we are in the video encoding space. In part 2, we create a logic app to upload and index the video. In part 3, we’ll need to split the video into its scenes and encode individual scenes. For reference, here are the links to all the parts:...

June 20, 2019 · 8 min · Kay Singh

How to identify boot, temp and data disks in Azure Linux VMs

In Azure, every VM has a persistent OS Disk that is used for booting the VM and contains the operating system. In addition to an OS disk, each VM also has a temporary disk that is present on the compute cluster hosting your VM. Why is my OS disk not @ /dev/sda? In most cases the OS disk is /dev/sda but in some odd cases it is not. This is not an Azure specific issue but a default Linux behavior....

April 30, 2019 · 3 min · Kay Singh

Detect Rolling Credits with Azure Video Indexer

Azure Video Indexer is one of my favorite services! It provides some amazing features such as: Identify faces and celebrities Extract text and objects (e.g. cat, table, car etc.) Detect scenes and shots Emotion and sentiment detection Audio effects such as clapping, silence & speech The full list of features can be viewed at https://vi.microsoft.com/en-us/ Get the credits rolling! Recently, Video Indexer announced they’ve added the capability to detect rolling credits in the videos....

April 11, 2019 · 2 min · Kay Singh

Microsoft Ignite 2018: VM Scale Sets + Shared Image Gallery = Infrastructure at scale - BRK3339

When you need to create a lot of instances from a custom VM image, VM Scale Sets and Shared Image Gallery are the services you need to use. In this session we walk through how to combine the power of VM Scale Sets & Shared Image Gallery to build infrastructure at scale.

September 27, 2018 · 1 min · Kay Singh

Microsoft Ignite 2018: What's new in Managed Disks - THR2263

Managed Disks make the managedment of disks a breeze in Azure. In this session I talk about the updates we’ve introduced to Managed Disks since Ignite 2017.

September 26, 2018 · 1 min · Kay Singh

Microsoft Ignite 2018: Migrating your IaaS infrastructure from ASM to ARM without downtime - THR2265

Azure Resource Manager stack has been released for almost three years now. In those three years many features have been added that are exclusive to Azure Resource Manager. In this session, I demonstrate the process of migrating your existing infrastructure to Azure Resource Manager without downtime. See a list of all the benefits here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/migrate-iaas-to-azure-resource-manager.

September 25, 2018 · 1 min · Kay Singh

Microsoft Ignite 2018: Share custom VM images with Shared Image Gallery - THR2264

Sharing custom images within an organization to different subscriptions globally has been a long standing ask from Azure customers. With Shared Image Gallery we’re making this dream a reality! Read more about Shared Image Gallery https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/shared-image-gallery-now-in-limited-public-preview/ In this session, I present how customers can get started with Shared Image Gallery.

September 24, 2018 · 1 min · Kay Singh

Testing x265 encoder scaling on a 128 core Azure VM for 4K HDR

Video encoding has always been a fairly compute intensive task. With every new generation of video encoders, more computational power has been required to achieve the compression benefits. HEVC/H.265 is the latest state of the art video compression standard with x265 being the most popular open-source encoder used for encoding into the HEVC/H.265 format. In comparison to AVC/H.264 (the previous state of the art encoding format), HEVC offers about double the data compression ratio at the same level of video quality, or substantially improved video quality at the same bit rate....

August 19, 2018 · 6 min · Kay Singh

Understanding the Azure B Series and CPU credits

Azure recently introduced its first burstable VM size - the B-series. This VM type is meant to compete directly with AWS' T2 instances. In the below few words (or more :smile: ) I try to explain what this means and why you should care. If you still have questions after reading, hit me up on Twitter or leave a comment below. So why do I need a burstable size anyway? If you have applications that remain idle for a long time and burst occasionally, then the B-series might be the perfect fit for you....

November 13, 2017 · 7 min · Kay Singh

Integrating Azure Automation Runbook Output with Logic Apps

Problem One of the challenges I have come across the last few days while working with Azure Automation & Logic Apps is how to integrate the output of the Automation Runbook in the Logic Apps workflow. Here’s the scenario, I have been trying to solve - Given an AzureRM resource Id, I want to parse out the name of the subscription, resource group & name of the resource. Here’s an example AzureRM resource Id for reference...

October 29, 2017 · 4 min · Kay Singh

Azure Cloud Shell + Solarized Dark = ❤️

I’m a big fan of typography! Clean and beautiful typography can make the experience of coding or reading an article so much better. It’s no wonder if you search for “best programming font”, there’s no shortage of font comparison articles. However, one of the things that is universally agreed upon is how terrible Courier/Courier New is. Azure Cloud Shell is a great product that takes away the complexity of figuring out the installation methods and authentication (esp....

October 23, 2017 · 2 min · Kay Singh