Highly available redundant Wowza cluster

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hi all,

I was curious on anyone’s thoughts about creating a highly available cluster of Wowza instances. Essentially, we’re looking to use Wowza as an origin server delivering streaming content to one of our partner CDN’s progressive media download services. Having multiple Wowza servers, all configured as live stream repeaters, we’d like the cluster to appear as one entity to our CDN. Short of a hardware loadbalance, in order to try our proof of concept, we’re thinking of putting a web server (a separate server) in front of the Wowza instances to act as a software load balance and reverse proxy. We’re considering using Nginx (or Apache Httpd) for this task. Are there any drawbacks or concerns that I should be aware of before considering such a setup?

Best regards,

Matt

2

Short of a hardware loadbalance, in order to try our proof of concept, we’re thinking of putting a web server (a separate server) in front of the Wowza instances to act as a software load balance and reverse proxy. We’re considering using Nginx (or Apache Httpd) for this task. Are there any drawbacks or concerns that I should be aware of before considering such a setup?

That web server will become a single point of failure, though it should be possible to setup two or more and have them under the same IP for failover & load balancing.

You will need to set up shop in at least two separate datacenters to have failover in case your primary datacenter goes down for whatever reason. It may be possible to use low TTL on DNS like 5 minutes and change it to your secondary DC in case of a huge failure at your primary one. There should be other ways of doing this, but DNS failover would be the cheapest if you want to provide only one address to your partners.

3

I am attempting the same setup and have similar questions. We would be using a small nginx cluster as a reverse proxy, where requests are passed between one of two wowza servers round-robin style.

mcaporali, have you made any decisions or findings in your planning? Maybe we can communicate via email directly?

4

You’re correct. I should have been more clear in my explanation. Its actually a cluster of web servers that’d be handling the load balancing. Once we are content with it running in one datacenter, than we’re looking to expand elsewhere. What I’m most concerned with, are there any side effects or concerns I should have with passing all of my traffic through this, essentially, software load balance before hitting the Wowza servers?