How to scale wowza - 2 scenarios

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hi,

We are looking into using Wowza in 2 use cases, and wonder how we can handle the scaling challenge in each of them.

VOD

In this deployment we have a lot of video files stored in S3 and would like to deploy a cluster of Wowza servers that will allow playing them.

We configure Wowza to read the video files directly from S3 as described in the Wowza documentation.

The clients are RTMP/T/S clients.

In this use case, we expect many unique clients accessing the video files, when each video file is played a few times only (hence no CDN functionality required).

The question is how to build the Wowza cluster? A simple load balancer will handle RTMP well since it is a single connection, but for RTMPT/S we need stickiness which is not necessarily supported by the client.

Live Streaming

In this scenario we have many video sources (publishers) streaming live video into the Wowza cluster in RTMP, and many clients consuming those videos using RTMP/T/S, where each client consumes a different video stream. The Wowza cluster should scale for both the video publishers AND the video clients.

In addition, in this scenario video streams are created and destroyed by the publishers very frequently, and it would be impossible to manually update the Wowza configuration for each such event. The solution needs to be dynamic.

Looks like one option we can try is a repeater-edge configuration, with multiple origin servers and multiple edge servers. The questions that arise are:

  • How to dynamically configure the edge servers such that they know the origin streams? Perhaps we con control this using the Wowza APIs, but how can this be done on the entire cluster of edge servers? Is there any cluster configuration management?

  • Just like in the VOD case, how do we support load balancing for the edge instances? For the origin instances it seems like a regular load balancer will do the work because there is no RTMPT/S there.

    Thanks!

2

Hi,

This was addressed in ticket #162331. However, for your and other users’ reference, I am also copying my response here:

VOD

We do have a Dynamic Load Balancer that you can look into which supports RTMP/RTMPS.

Live Streaming

We have had users that have deployed clusters of Wowza servers in their workflow. Some points that you can consider:

  • You can use our silent install option to spin up an instance as needed. For more information on using this option, do contact sales to obtain a silent install key. This is separate from your standard Wowza license key.

  • I would strongly recommend that you

  • You can look into our Central Configuration AddOn to manage your multiple Wowza servers.

  • Do look into leveraging the REST API to make configuration changes as needed.

  • You can also look into the StreamName Alias module. This module allows you to configure the URLs to your origin streams and map them to simple stream names (you may need to host the mapping file on a web server so that it is accessible to multiple servers, or sync it across your cluster). Any edge server that you spin up would then have access to these URLs without additional configuration. You can then connect the edge server applications to these stream names.

    Similarly, do look into the Dynamic Load Balancer to handle the playback requests and distribute them across your cluster.

    For the origin/publisher load balancing, you can look into a more straightforward round-robin DNS load balancer.

    I hope this helps.

    Michelle