Multimedia Cloud Computing Systems

Book excerpt: The second generation of cloud computing systems, known as domain-specific clouds, are emerging based on application-specific processors and serverless computing paradigm. As multimedia streaming services are increasingly growing in popularity and diversity, this book is authored to introduce “multimedia clouds” as a domain-specific cloud that operates in the intersection of cloud computing technologies and digital media streaming. The book concentrates on the architectural aspects of multimedia clouds and describes development of high-level abstractions that will mitigate the burden of programmers, cloud architects, and system administrators. Multimedia clouds not only democratize multimedia streaming and add flexibility to the streaming services, they also help stream providers to offer robust and reliable streaming services in a cost- and energy-efficient manner.