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As VOD libraries expand, broadcasters face rising storage demands and slower data access. To address that, we propose a model using Amazon S3 video storage that keeps media scalable, secure, and cost-efficient over time. Why Amazon S3 Video Storage Fits Modern VOD Workflows Launched on March 14 2006, Amazon S3 began as one of the first public cloud storage services. The current API version—2006-03-01—has remained stable for nearly two decades while continuously adding new capabilities such as lifecycle automation, reduced storage tiers, and improved console features. Over more than 15 years of updates, S3 has grown far beyond “a storage bucket” into a global object storage platform that supports replication, logging, and analytics at scale. According to Wikipedia, the number of stored objects increased from about 10 billion in 2007 to more than 400 billion in 2023—illustrating how it scales with worldwide demand for AWS cloud storage and video streaming workloads. Key technical advantages of Amazon S3 video storage: Scalability: Pay only for the data you use—no pre-provisioning or capacity limits. Durability: Designed for 99.999999999 percent (“11 nines”) data durability, ensuring media integrity over time. Cost flexibility: Multiple storage classes allow efficient tiering from frequently to rarely accessed content. Deep AWS integration: Works seamlessly with CloudFront, Lambda, Athena, and Glue to handle video processing and delivery. Security and compliance: Versioning, Object Lock, and CloudTrail logging meet broadcast-grade data-governance requirements. With this maturity, scalability, and reliability, Amazon S3 video storage has become the natural foundation for broadcasters building modern VOD systems. Solution Architecture: Multi-Tier VOD Storage on Amazon S3 The broadcasting team built its VOD system around Amazon S3 video storage to handle about 50 GB of new recordings each day — nearly 18 TB per year. The goal was simple: keep all video available, but spend less on storage that’s rarely accessed. Instead of treating every file the same, the data is separated by lifecycle. New uploads stay in S3 Standard for quick access, while older footage automatically moves to cheaper tiers such as Standard-IA and Glacier. Cross-Region Replication creates a copy in another region for disaster recovery, and versioning keeps track of every edit or replacement. This setup cuts monthly cost by more than half compared with storing everything in a single class. It also reduces manual work - files move, age, and archive automatically based on defined lifecycle rules. The rest of this section breaks down how the system works in practice. (AWS Best Practice) System Overview The storage system is split into a few simple parts, each doing one clear job. Primary S3 bucket (Region A – Singapore): This is where all new videos land after being uploaded from local studios. Editors and producers can access these files directly for a few months while the content is still fresh and often reused. Lifecycle rules for auto-tiering: After the first three months, the system automatically shifts older objects to cheaper storage tiers. It’s handled through lifecycle rules, so there’s no need to track or move files manually. Cross-Region Replication (Region B – Tokyo): Every new file is copied to another region for redundancy. If one region fails or faces downtime, all data can still be restored from the secondary location. Access control and versioning: Access policies define who can read or modify content, while versioning keeps a full history of changes — useful when editors replace or trim video files. Together, these components keep the VOD archive easy to manage: new content stays fast to access, archived footage stays safe, and everything costs far less than a one-tier setup. Optimizing with AWS Storage Classes Each phase of a video’s lifecycle maps naturally to a different AWS storage class. In the early stage, new uploads stay in S3 Standard, where editors still access them frequently for editing or scheduling broadcasts. After the first few months, when the files are mostly finalized, they shift to S3 Standard-IA, which keeps the same quick access speed but costs almost half as much. As the archive grows, older footage that is rarely needed moves automatically to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, where it remains available for years at a fraction of the price. Content that only needs to be retained for compliance or historical purposes can be stored safely in S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval or Deep Archive, depending on how long it needs to stay accessible. This tiered structure keeps the storage lean and predictable. Costs fall gradually as data ages while every file remains retrievable whenever required, something that traditional on-premise systems rarely achieve. It allows broadcasters to manage expanding VOD libraries without overpaying for high-performance storage that most of their content no longer needs. Storage Class Use Case Access Speed Cost Level Typical Retention S3 Standard New uploads and frequently accessed videos Milliseconds High 0–90 days S3 Standard-IA Less-accessed content, still in rotation Milliseconds Medium 90–180 days S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval Older videos that may need quick access Milliseconds Low 6–12 months S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval Archival content, rarely accessed Minutes to hours Very low 1–3 years S3 Glacier Deep Archive Historical backups or compliance data Hours Lowest 3+ years Automating Data Tiering with Amazon S3 Lifecycle Policy Manually tracking which videos are old enough to move to cheaper storage becomes unrealistic once the archive grows to terabytes. To avoid that, the team set up an Amazon S3 lifecycle policy that automatically transitions data between storage tiers depending on how long each object has been in the bucket. This approach removes manual work and ensures that every file lives in the right tier for its age and access frequency. The rule applies to all objects in the vod-storage-bucket. For roughly the first three months, videos remain in S3 Standard, where they are frequently opened by editors and producers for re-editing or rebroadcasting. After 90 days, the lifecycle rule moves those files to S3 Standard-IA, which keeps millisecond-level access speed but costs around 40% less. When videos reach about six months old, they are transitioned again to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, which provides durable, low-cost storage while still allowing quick restores when needed. After three years, the system automatically deletes expired files to keep the archive clean and avoid paying for data no one uses anymore. Below is the JSON configuration used for the policy: What this policy does: After 90 days, objects are moved from S3 Standard to S3 Standard-IA. After 180 days, the same objects move to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval. After 3 years (1,095 days), the data is deleted automatically. This way, fresh content stays fast, older content stays cheap, and the archive never grows forever. Ensuring Redundancy with Cross-Region Replication (S3 CRR) When broadcasters archive years of video, the question isn’t just cost — it’s “what if a region goes down?” To keep content recoverable, the system enables S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR). Each new or updated file in the primary bucket is automatically copied to a backup bucket in another AWS region. This setup uses a simple AWS CLI command: When CRR is active, every object uploaded to the vod-storage-bucket is duplicated in vod-backup-bucket, stored in a different region such as Tokyo. If the main region suffers an outage or data loss, the broadcaster can still restore or stream files from the backup. Besides disaster recovery, CRR supports compliance requirements that demand off-site backups and version protection. It also gives flexibility: the destination can use a lower-cost storage class, cutting replication expenses while keeping full data redundancy. Cost Analysis: Amazon S3 Pricing for VOD Workloads To evaluate the actual savings, the team estimated the monthly cost of storing roughly 18 TB of VOD data on Amazon S3. If everything stayed in S3 Standard, the cost would reach about $0.023 per GB per month, or nearly $414 USD in total. This flat setup is simple but inefficient, as older videos that are rarely accessed still sit in the most expensive storage class. With lifecycle tiering enabled, the same 18 TB is distributed across several classes based on how often each dataset is used. Around 4.5 TB of recent videos remain in S3 Standard for fast access, another 4.5 TB shifts to S3 Standard-IA, and the rest (about 9 TB) moves to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval for long-term retention. Based on AWS’s current pricing, this mix brings the total monthly cost down to around $195–$200, cutting storage expenses by over 50 percent while keeping all assets available when needed. Storage Segment Approx. Volume Storage Class Price (USD / GB / month) Estimated Monthly Cost New videos (0–90 days) 4.5 TB S3 Standard $0.023 ~$103.5 90–180 days 4.5 TB S3 Standard-IA $0.0125 ~$56.25 180 days+ 9 TB S3 Glacier IR $0.004 ~$36 Total 18 TB — — ~$195.75 Final Thoughts The VOD storage model built on Amazon S3 shows how broadcasters can balance scale, reliability, and cost in one system. By combining lifecycle policies, multi-tier storage, and cross-region replication, the workflow stays simple while infrastructure costs drop sharply. With Amazon S3 video storage, broadcasters can scale their VOD systems sustainably and cost-effectively — turning storage from a fixed cost into a flexible, data-driven resource. If your team is looking to modernize or optimize an existing VOD platform, Haposoft can help assess your current setup and design a tailored AWS storage strategy that grows with your needs.

On October 20, 2025, an outage in AWS’s us-east-1 region took down over sixty services, from EC2 and S3 to Cognito and SageMaker, disrupting businesses worldwide. It was a wake-up call for teams everywhere to rethink their cloud architecture, monitoring, and recovery strategies. Overview of the AWS us-east-1 Outage On October 20, 2025, a major outage struck Amazon Web Services’ us-east-1 region in Northern Virginia. This region is among the busiest and most relied upon in AWS’s global network. The incident disrupted core cloud infrastructure for several hours, affecting millions of users and thousands of dependent platforms worldwide. According to AWS, the failure originated from an internal subsystem that monitors the health of network load balancers within the EC2 environment. This malfunction cascaded into DNS resolution errors, preventing key services like DynamoDB, Lambda, and S3 from communicating properly. As a result, applications depending on those APIs began timing out or returning errors, producing widespread connectivity failures. More than sixty AWS services, including EC2, S3, RDS, CloudFormation, Elastic Load Balancing, and DynamoDB were partially or fully unavailable for several hours. AWS officially classified the disruption as a “Multiple Services Operational Issue.” Though temporary workarounds were deployed, full recovery took most of the day as engineers gradually stabilized the internal networking layer. Timeline and Scope of Impact Event Details Start Time October 20, 2025 – 07:11 UTC (≈ 2:11 PM UTC+7 / 3:11 AM ET) Full Service Restoration Around 10:35 UTC (≈ 5:35 PM UTC+7 / 6:35 AM ET), with residual delays continuing for several hours Region Affected us-east-1 (Northern Virginia) AWS Services Impacted 64 + services across compute, storage, networking, and database layers Severity Level High — classified as a multiple-service outage affecting global API traffic. Status Fully resolved by late evening (UTC+7), October 20 2025. During peak impact, major consumer platforms, including Snapchat, Fortnite, Zoom, WhatsApp, Duolingo, and Ring, etc reported downtime or degraded functionality, underscoring how many global services depend on AWS’s Virginia backbone. AWS Services Affected During the Outage The outage affected a broad range of AWS services across compute, storage, networking, and application layers. Core infrastructure saw the heaviest impact, followed by data, AI, and business-critical systems. Category Sub-Area Impacted Services Core Infrastructure Compute & Serverless AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Batch Storage & Database Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon DocumentDB Networking & Security Amazon VPC, AWS Transit Gateway, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator, Amazon Route 53, AWS WAF AI/ML and Data Services Machine Learning Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Textract Data Processing Amazon EMR, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue Business-Critical Services Communication Amazon SNS, Amazon SES, Amazon Pinpoint, Amazon Chime Integration & Workflow Amazon EventBridge, AWS Step Functions, Amazon MQ, Amazon API Gateway Security & Compliance AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS Key Management Service (KMS), Amazon Cognito These layers failed in sequence, causing cross-service dependencies to break and leaving customers unable to deploy, authenticate users, or process data across multiple regions. How the Outage Affected Cloud Operations When us-east-1 went down, the impact wasn’t contained to a few services, it spread through the stack. Core systems failed in sequence, and every dependency that touched them started to slow, timeout, or return inconsistent data. What followed was one of the broadest chain reactions AWS has seen in recent years. 1. Cascading Failures The multi-service nature of the outage caused cascading failures across dependent systems. When core components such as Cognito, RDS, and S3 went down simultaneously, other services that relied on them began throwing exceptions and timing out. In many production workloads, a single broken API call triggered full workflow collapse as retries compounded the load and spread the outage through entire application stacks. 2. Data Consistency Problems The outage severely disrupted data consistency across multiple services. Failures between RDS and ElastiCache led to cache invalidation problems, while DynamoDB Global Tables suffered replication delays between regions. In addition, S3 and CloudFront returned inconsistent assets from edge locations, causing stale content and broken data synchronization across distributed workloads. 3. Authentication and Authorization Breakdowns AWS’s identity and security stack also experienced significant instability. Services like Cognito, IAM, Secrets Manager, and KMS were all affected, interrupting login, permission, and key management flows. As a result, many applications couldn’t authenticate users, refresh tokens, or decrypt data, effectively locking out legitimate access even when compute resources remained healthy. 4. Business Impact Scenarios The outage hit multiple workloads and customer-facing systems across industries: E-commerce → Payment and order-processing pipelines stalled as Lambda, API Gateway, and RDS timed out. SES and SNS failed to deliver confirmation emails, affecting checkout flows on platforms like Shopify Plus and BigCommerce. SaaS and consumer apps → Authentication via Cognito and IAM broke, causing login errors and session drops in services like Snapchat, Venmo, Slack, and Fortnite. Media & streaming → CloudFront, S3, and Global Accelerator latency led to buffering and downtime across Prime Video, Spotify, and Apple Music integrations. Data & AI workloads → Glue, Kinesis, and SageMaker jobs failed mid-run, disrupting ETL pipelines and inference services; analytics dashboards showed stale or missing data. Enterprise tools → Office 365, Zoom, and Canva experienced degraded performance due to dependency on AWS networking and storage layers. Insight: The outage showed that even “multi-AZ” redundancy within a single region isn’t enough. For critical workloads, true resilience requires cross-region failover and independent identity and data paths. Key Technical Lessons and Reliable Cloud Practices The us-east-1 outage exposed familiar reliability gaps — single-region dependencies, missing isolation layers, and reactive rather than preventive monitoring. Below are consolidated lessons and proven practices that teams can apply to build more resilient architectures. 1. Avoid Single-Region Dependency One of the clearest takeaways from the us-east-1 outage is that relying on a single region is no longer acceptable. For years, many teams treated us-east-1 as the de facto home of their workloads because it’s fast, well-priced, and packed with AWS services. But that convenience turned into fragility: when the region failed, everything tied to it went down with it. The fix isn’t complicated in theory, but it requires architectural intent: run active workloads in at least two regions, replicate critical data asynchronously, and design routing that automatically fails over when one region becomes unavailable. This approach doesn’t just protect uptime, it also protects reputation, compliance, and business continuity. 2. Isolate Failures with Circuit Breakers and Service Mesh The outage highlighted how a single broken dependency can quickly cascade through an entire system. When services are tightly coupled, one failure often leads to a flood of retries and timeouts that overwhelm the rest of the stack. Without proper isolation, even a minor disruption can escalate into a complete service breakdown. Circuit breakers help contain these failures by detecting repeated errors and temporarily stopping requests to the unhealthy service. They act as a safeguard that gives systems time to recover instead of amplifying the problem. Alongside that, a service mesh such as AWS App Mesh or Istio applies these resilience policies consistently across microservices, without requiring any change to application code 3. Design for Graceful Degradation One of the biggest lessons from the outage is that a system doesn’t have to fail completely just because one part goes down. A well-designed application should be able to degrade gracefully, keeping essential features alive while less critical ones pause. This approach turns a potential outage into a temporary slowdown rather than a total shutdown. In practice, that means preparing fallback paths in advance. Cache responses locally when databases are unreachable, serve read-only data when write operations fail, and make sure authentication remains available even if analytics or messaging features are offline. These small design choices protect user trust and maintain service continuity when infrastructure falters. 4. Strengthen Observability and Proactive Alerting During the us-east-1 outage, many teams learned about the disruption not from their dashboards, but from their users. That delay cost hours of downtime that could have been mitigated with better observability. Building a resilient system starts with seeing what’s happening — in real time and across multiple data sources. To achieve that, monitoring should extend beyond AWS’s native tools. Combine CloudWatch with external systems like Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog to correlate metrics, traces, and logs across services. Alerts should trigger based on anomalies or trends, not just static thresholds. And most importantly, observability data must live outside the impacted region to avoid blind spots during regional failures. 5. Build for Automated Recovery and Test Resilience The outage showed that relying on manual recovery is a costly mistake. When systems fail at scale, waiting for human response wastes valuable time and magnifies the impact. A reliable system must detect problems automatically and trigger recovery workflows immediately. CloudWatch alarms, Step Functions, and internal health checks can restart failed components, promote standby databases, or reroute traffic without human input. The best teams also treat recovery as a continuous process, not an emergency fix, ensuring automation is built, tested, and improved over time. True resilience goes beyond automation. Regular chaos experiments help verify that recovery logic works when it truly matters. Simulating database timeouts, service latency, or full region loss exposes weak points before real failures do. When recovery and testing become routine, teams stop reacting to incidents and start preventing them. Action Plan for Teams Moving Forward The AWS outage reminded us that no cloud is truly fail-proof. We know where to go next, but meaningful change takes time. This plan helps teams make steady, practical improvements without disrupting what already works. Next 30 days Review how your workloads depend on AWS services, especially those concentrated in a single region. Set up baseline monitoring that tracks latency, errors, and availability from outside AWS. Document incident playbooks so response steps are clear and repeatable. Run small-scale failover tests to confirm that backups and DNS routing behave as expected. Next 3–6 months Roll out multi-region deployment for high-impact workloads. Replicate critical data asynchronously across regions. Introduce controlled failure testing to verify that automation and fallback logic hold up under stress. Begin adding auto-recovery or self-healing workflows for key services. Next 6–12 months Evaluate hybrid or multi-cloud options to reduce vendor and regional risk. Explore edge computing for latency-sensitive use cases. Enhance observability with AI-assisted alerting or anomaly detection. Build a full business continuity plan that covers both technology and operations. Haposoft has years of hands-on experience helping teams design, test, and scale reliable AWS systems. If your infrastructure needs to be more resilient after this incident, our engineers can support you in building, testing, and maintaining that foundation. Cloud outages will always happen. What matters is how ready you are when they do. Conclusion That hiccup in AWS us-east-1 showed just how vulnerable everything is, actually. Now it’s about learning to bounce back, running drills, then getting ready for what happens next time. True dependability doesn’t appear instantly; instead, it grows through consistent little fixes so things don’t fall apart when trouble strikes. We’re still helping groups create cloud setups meant to withstand failures. This recent disruption teaches us lessons; consequently, our future builds will be more robust, straightforward, also ready for whatever happens.