Encapsulating video streaming Microservices for Planet-scale deployment of video streaming solutions.
In the past few weeks, I've been working on a project that should greatly simplify the deployment of video streaming services anywhere on the planet at either small-scale or planet-scale, leveraging Kubernetes clusters and encapsulating traditional streaming technologies such as NGINX on top of container technology such as Docker.
The benefits of such deployment are many since this kind of continuously integrated deployment wouldn’t be dictated by any one company or centralized gatekeeper. Any user could deploy an enterprise-level video streaming service at their command to meet any particular demand and devoid of arbitrary limits imposed by SaaS providers.
This technology leverages the benefits of public cloud infrastructure including elastic load balancing, and autoscaling to be able to horizontally scale out for more compute-intense solutions and to scale out in case of any spike in traffic in conjunction with the load balancer. Kubernetes combined with any major public cloud provider would make this omnidirectional scaling possible.
The problem that each StreamPod solves has most likely been solved in the aggregate by other service providers, what StreamPods aims to aid is for those small use cases in which an expensive yearly or monthly contract might not be needed more ephemeral and localized solution is required.
The long-term solution should be able to allow VOD or Livestreaming deployments to be elastic and dispersed in any desired region(s) of the planet. As of now, the currently encapsulated pods can be deployed as containers and more importantly as Pods within a Kubernetes cluster in any major public cloud provider as well as any premises that support Kubernetes.
Why and how was this built?
To simplify deployment and scaling of adaptive live-streaming services. I've built this set of tools to have a simple turnkey technology that can allow us to set independent and self-hosted streaming solutions devoid of any monthly/yearly contracts and tailor them to any specific and ever-evolving use-case or need.
The Technology Stack for StreamPods consists of the following:
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- Traditional Video Player and Livestreaming Server technology.
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- CI/CD workflows in GIT.
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- Docker Containers.
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- Kubernetes.
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- AWS's Cloudformation, ECS, ECR, EKS & ELB.
The following URLs contain the repositories and containers, currently deployed in a fully managed orchestrated service provided by AWS's EKS platform.
[StreamPod Engine in Github] [StreamPod Engine in Docker]
[StreamPod Player in Github] [StreamPod Player in Docker]
For a quick overview of the CI/CD deployment process of the StreamPod engine on Kubernetes, please watch the following video:
