In our consideration of Rivendell, a question arose as to whether there might be a cloud version. Something like RivenCloud (a tip ‘o the hat to John Penovich) or Valinor (the Undying Lands, a nod to Tolkien).
RCS its marketing a cloud-based automation system, primarily for disaster recovery: https://www.rcsworks.com/press-releases/cloud-automation-reveal/ Why couldn’t instances of Rivendell running on Amazon AWS become a station’s primary automation system? No hardware to maintain and the system would be just as accessible as a box in the next room, given the ease of VNC connections. From the transmitter site’s perspective, everything is already in some cloud. That’s whether the STL connection is via microwave, fiber, or DSL. RivenCloud could send a high-quality stream directly to the transmitter as easily as it would simultaneously feed a MP3/AAC version to the station’s streaming provider. Now, talk like this strikes terror into the hearts of red-blooded engineers. What happens when the ‘net connection goes down on Christmas Eve when there’s nary an IT person from one’s university or cloud provider to be found? How do we deal with inevitable backhoe fades? And how could we possibly threaten cranky machines by brandishing a bright orange mallet in front of it, which sometimes seems to work, psychologically at least. (Need to be careful as machines become sentient; threatening didn’t work so well with HAL.) Might in-the-cloud Rivendell instances be doable? Is this already being done? Frank Christel _______________________________________________ Rivendell-dev mailing list Rivendell-dev@lists.rivendellaudio.org http://caspian.paravelsystems.com/mailman/listinfo/rivendell-dev
