Creating a Secure Video Postproduction Solution on AWS Using NICE DCV with Suite Studios

Suite, which is based in Boulder, Colorado, has 40 studio customers and around 425 total users. The company provides cloud-based file storage and remote workstations so customers can work on postproduction tasks, like editing video projects, as if their employees were all in the same location. Suite’s goal was to build a solution that could scale to meet the requirements of demanding video and media-focused projects and could eliminate heavy lifting and noncreative work, such as managing on-premises infrastructure or dealing with the logistics of shipping hard drives.

In early 2022, Suite launched its first product: scalable remote workstations. Throughout the following year, the company improved that solution through an iterative process, and in July 2023, it launched a companion solution for secure file storage. For that solution, Suite uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

“Our company was born on AWS, and it has been an excellent decision for Suite Studios,” says Mike Hering, cofounder and chief technology officer at Suite. “We chose AWS for its performance and reliability at massive scale.” Similar to how Suite handles the heavy lifting so its customers can focus on their creative workflows, the company uses AWS and serverless services to focus on building its products instead of on maintaining servers.

Using Amazon EC2 combined with DCV, Suite offers its customers extremely low latency when interacting with its remote workstations. The company also knew it needed high-performance instances and high-performance display streaming to make a studio in the cloud work for creative teams. “Media and entertainment creatives have some of the strictest and highest performance requirements,” says Hering. To meet those needs, Suite uses DCV, which offers features that are important to its customers, such as multiple monitor support, high color accuracy, and audio and video synchronization. “There were very technical specifics in using Amazon EC2 and DCV, and the AWS support team was critical in helping us resolve challenges,” says Hering. “No matter how technical we needed to get, the AWS support team was always prepared to dive in with us.”

Suite’s solution for postproduction studios includes Amazon DynamoDB—a fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database designed to run high-performance applications at virtually any scale—and AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets users run code for virtually any type of application or backend service. The company chose these services because they are serverless and offer a consistent customer experience.

Suite’s solution provides fast, high-performance file storage and virtual workstations that can scale with customer projects and demand. It uses Amazon EC2 to spin up cloud workstations and DCV to give its customers one-click connection to those workstations and access to high-quality streams that support the full media workflow.

By using serverless services, Suite pays only for what it needs, so its costs scale predictably with its usage. The company also uses Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing, so it pays for compute capacity by the hour or second with no long-term commitments. When customers power up their workstations, the company has very predictable costs, which scale directly with product usage. Suite further optimizes its costs by using DCV, which is included in Amazon EC2.

The company has also improved staff efficiency, which is especially important for a small engineering team such as Suite’s. “We went cloud native from day one and have leaned in fully to using AWS,” says Hering. “Our teams can focus on our business logic. We hit deploy, and it is running.” The company works more efficiently using AWS. This efficiency has reduced the length of Suite’s development cycle times. As a result, the company can move new products and product iterations to market quickly. “It took 1 year to deliver the studio in the cloud and 1 year to deliver our cloud-native file system” says Hering. “We are very happy with our engineering team and with what we’ve been able to accomplish using AWS.” Suite can also onboard new customers within 5 minutes after receiving a contact.