MD3 solution for a highly scalable streaming infrastructure

5ostudios is a development company in Kuwait that works on multiple projects in the Media/Streaming sector.

This client has contacted us to help with a solution for a highly scalable streaming infrastructure, to support a project that they were developing.

The main goal was to design and implement a solution to a streaming infrastructure to support up to 100k clients while maintaining the costs as low as possible.

The project was a mobile application for a trivia game that would have streaming at certain times of the day with the questions.

This type of usage is perfect for a public cloud because we could scale the infrastructure during the hours that we have events, and then stop it when there is no broadcast.

MD3's Solution

We've decided to leverage the solution from Hetzner Cloud (www.hetzner.com ) due to their low prices on the cloud offer, and also because their instances come with 10Gb network interfaces and 10TB of egress traffic included on the price.

To deliver the solution to the customer we used a couple of different technologies, such as:

• Hetzner Cloud - Hosting of the streaming infrastructure;
• Terraform - Infrastructure as Code to programmatically start/stop the streaming infrastructure when needed;
• Ansible - Configuration manager for the instances in Hetzner cloud
• Nimble Streamer - streaming server

Infrastructure diagram

This article is an introduction to MD3's solution for a highly scalable streaming infrastructure. Stay tuned for more.

This is an article written by Gonçalo Dias, Software Engineer @md3.

Gonçalo has 7 years of experience in systems administration, with a special taste for Linux systems and high availability. He is the MD3's Head of IT, and is responsible for the management of the entire infrastructure of the Mediatree group and for the continuous development of all solutions and technologies used.