SDVI is always refining the Rally platform to address the technical and operational requirements of its users. Here’s a quick summary of Rally updates delivered in Q3 and Q4 2020, as well as the newest additions to the Rally Application Services Market.
Rally Core Updates
SDVI has updated two major parts of the Rally Media Supply Chain Platform — the Assets and Jobs pages — based on direct user feedback.
Enhanced Assets Page
Central elements of Rally Core, the Asset Detail and Asset Overview views have been improved to support the expanding array of use cases that make up the Rally supply chain ecosystem.
A new and improved Asset Status implementation enables different departments inside a media company to control the asset status display for different, often parallel, supply chains. In addition to displaying and filtering asset status, the list view of status information allows operators to customize the display of key metadata and asset titles. Asset Status icons and text can be adapted to display detailed status and history for an asset (Asset Detail) as a supply chain runs, and then collapse after the supply chain is complete to display overarching status (Asset Overview).
An ingest operator, for example, could use this new functionality to display detailed step-by-step information, such as completed QC and review steps, during the ingest process and then switch to a simple “Ingest Complete” display once the supply chain has run successfully.
The Asset Detail view features improved asset inventory and job management functionality, enabling operators to find files more easily within any asset; get information about technical and descriptive metadata of those files; and run, monitor, and interact with jobs and supply chains on the asset. With these capabilities, operators can monitor and manipulate the complete life cycle of an asset, without the need to navigate to any other portion of Rally.
New Jobs Page
A new and improved Jobs page features the same filtering and sorting scheme introduced for other pages in previous Rally releases. With that functionality normalized, operators enjoy search and filtering functions across all parts of Rally.
Job information now includes all available artifacts for the jobs (error messages, rendered presets, analysis and QC data, and more). All actions and a detailed progress summary are available straight from the details view. The page also supplies links to the provider, the preset, and the content, as well as previous retries of the job. If a job was part of an overarching supply chain, operators can open that job in the supply chain visualizer to see its context within the end-to-end supply chain. Filters and job details are represented by unique URLs to simplify the sharing of views between operators and support staff
Rally Gateway Updates
Upload Use Case Enhancement
File Upload widgets now support the dynamic renaming of uploaded files using placeholders and macros. In addition to streamlining the upload process for multiple files, this enhancement to Rally Gateway enables secure uploading of files by eliminating the possibility of file overwrites when suppliers use similar filenames.
A new Upload Collector widget in Gateway lists all files a user has uploaded in a session and allows those files to be re-ordered and augmented with further metadata. Any files that were uploaded erroneously can be “unchecked” so they are deleted by the supply chain. Operators can use the Upload Collector along with a metadata widget and supply chain trigger to upload a collection of files and metadata to Rally and to create assets and store inventory and metadata at the beginning of the end-to-end supply chain. Before files are submitted to the supply chain, user-supplied metadata is validated across all fields to ensure data integrity.
Storage Location File Picker
Listing files in a configured storage location, the new Storage Location File Picker widget is helpful when files are already on S3 but not yet associated with an asset. With this widget, operators now can configure gateways to match a file on S3 to an inventory item in a Rally asset as a trigger for processing supply chains.
Customizable Work Order Display
In both Rally and Rally Gateway, operators now can customize the display of additional asset metadata on the work order list. With a choice of two metadata areas, one immediately visible in the list and the other available as a click-tooltip on the state icon, operators can more easily identify what they need to work on. This new function is valuable when more than just the asset name is needed to identify the right work order.
Application Services Market Updates
In an ongoing effort to widen the Application Services Market for Rally users, SDVI integrates new third-party services on a quarterly basis. These integrations are based on customer feedback and involve production use cases.
Microsoft Azure Video Analyzer
Rally now supports the Azure Video Analyzer, an ML provider by Microsoft Azure that enables object, person, text, spoken word, and emotion detection in proxy video stored on Microsoft Azure Blob Storage. This integration expands Rally’s ML offering beyond AWS Rekognition Video and Google Video Intelligence.
Amazon Rekognition Segment Detection
Rally’s Rekognition provider now implements the Amazon Rekognition Segment Detection feature. Segment detection in Rekognition includes the detection of black frames, end credits, and color bars, and also supports shot detection. This data is available in both Access Premiere Panel and Accurate QC sessions.
SecretStore Support for Parameter Store
SecretStore is an internal Rally service that stores information for accessing AWS Parameter Store, and it is newly enhanced to support secrets from the AWS Secrets Manager, as well. Once a SecretStore is configured, secrets and parameters stored in Parameter Store or Secrets Manager can be accessed in presets and jobs. This integration enables handling of sensitive information such as encryption keys in Rally-managed jobs without operators or support personnel gaining unauthorized access to that data. With this latest update, the service includes automatic deletion of secrets after they have been used in a job.
