Load Balancing Question

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

I am trying to be efficient with our servers and not over-spend where I don’t have to.

Our client load is now putting a tax on our individual server which ingests and throws to our CDN for distribution. So… load balancing here I come.

What I am planning on is starting with a load balanced cluster here in the North America and using that knowledge to expand globally.

So …

Encoder —> Wowza LB ----> {1…n}Wowza Transcoding Servers

While I know my Transcoding servers need to be beefy (currently using G2.2xlarge on AWS), does my LB need to be all that beefy, or just optimized for networking. Can I get away with something a bit smaller, or do I need to have a beefy AMI running there?

Thoughts?

On another note, I will say that the setup documentation for Wowza Load Balancing is a bit dense to wade through, so if anyone has some knowledge to impart or places to point to, please contact me directly. It seems that most of the documentation is about serving up to viewers and not distributing encoded RTMP amongst unloaded servers for eventual ingest into a CDN.

TIA,

Bob

2

Hello,

Encoder load balancing can be a bit tricky to setup, as it will require some sort of origin server/stream tracking for client playback connections. If you’re using a CDN such as CloudFront that allows for multiple origin servers and mapped “behaviors”, this maybe possible using an intelligent load balancer.

The Wowza Dynamic Load Balancer runs on top of Wowza Streaming Engine, so it’s suggested that the server size is at least large enough to meet the minimum recommend server specifications needed for Wowza Streaming Engine.

As you noted, the Wowza Dynamic Load Balancer is designed for playback/client connections, not encoder publishing connections. If your looking for more information on this in addition to the pdf information included with the Dynamic Load Balancer, Wowza has an article that shows how to load balance playback clients using cloud based instances, see below:

Load Balancing Between Servers

Best regards,

Andrew