Case Study: Microbrewery Taps Flash For Live Coverage of Annual Cycling Event

The platform is technically provisioned in several ways, beginning with an entry level service model. Most clients aren’t certain what their audience size will be at the beginning. The base platform, which is usually Windows or Linux, starts with a small footprint (somewhere around 200Mbps based on aggregate streaming services), mixing and matching different formats upon request. Advanced services such as clustering and load balancing are enabled from there.

The audience footprint in regards to global delivery is important, and clustering allows the client to scale their system to reach more users. Capacity is added to the base infrastructure to accommodate growth. This typically means adding storage capacity, as well as parallel processing to have a set number of servers working together as an individual unit. This simple path addresses growth linearly by adding capacity to support another 200-400Mbps of total aggregate bandwidth or an additional terabyte of storage.

Load balancing is often done when growing out a cluster. StreamGuys offer three main styles of load balancing. The first is Anycast Load Balancing, which provides the fastest route to the viewer when a stream is requested. The closest node to a specific geographical data center will route the stream to the viewer based on the network routing time from all data centers. This also offers the most stable stream and a better overall streaming experience.

The second form of load balancing is a hardware-based approach that is traditional for Web servers. A cluster of servers, perhaps 10 or more, is accessed when content is requested. Those servers all come together and receive hardware load balancing so they function as a single unit. Redundancy is also in place if the main server fails. The load balancer simply removes the failed server from the queue and replaces it with a functional unit until the cluster is back to 100 percent.

The third style of load balancing is a hybrid approach of hardware and software. StreamGuys often installs a load balancing scheme on a generic "white box" that will operate in the same data center to load balance a cluster of servers. In these situations, load balancing is built into the various protocols for streaming media; this is especially true in Windows Media load balancing. This form of load balancing is especially useful in live broadcasts where signals are coming from multiple locations. This approach provides redundancy from the origin point and splits the source stream into a large number of cluster servers. This ensures the signal path remains redundant throughout the entire process. While these services aren’t necessarily crucial in a single-channel configuration, it provides a snapshot of how to effectively operate a multi-channel configuration.

The New Belgium Brewery expects to announce its 2008 streaming plans in the near future, and it seems likely there will be at least one live streaming event. With a potential Guinness Book of World Record of 3,635 people joining the Ft. Collins bike parade last fall, the event is certain to gain more attention.