Load balancing for Origin Server: Live streams

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hi,

We have a application that will have many live streams coming into the origin wowza server which we have to broadcast. We have sorted out how to manage the broadcasting part usingCDN etc, but are unable to figure out how to manage the incoming streams.

Assuming we have random and highly variable 1000+ incoming live streams, I am assuming the origin may face load issues. The incoming streams are random an can happen any time. We want a on demand scalable option to manage our origin, but how do we manage the streaming to the origins. Is there a way to automatically transfer load to other origin server without negatively impacting the streaming experience.

We had read about the fallback server with 12 second blackout, but we are not looking for a fallback, but a ready scenario to handle sudden incoing bursts.

2nd part of the problem is if we do manage to balance load using multiple origins, wouldnt that change the final viewing path?

Thanks

Krunnal

2

Hello Krunnal,

Publishing Distribution:

You could certainly do round robin DNS to your origins in terms of distribution of the incoming streams. Depending on the source, however, you may even be able to do a service request to obtain the least loaded server first and then you could publish to it thereafter.

Handling Playback:

If the CDN is maintained by you, you could write some custom module(s) that would send announcements to your edges each time a new stream is published to an origin. The announcement would contain the origin in question thus allowing each edge to know how to route each new playback request (versus checking and failing over).

Thanks,

Matt