I apologize in advance if this is a simple question, but I can’t seem to find a straight answer.
This is for live event only streaming and I’ve already been able to successfully set up and test both the Wowza Media Server on an EC2 Instance both with and without using CloudFront for distribution. We’re encoding using Teradek Cube at 2.5-3.5Mbps, transcoding a cascade of lower bitrates using the Wowza Transcoder AddOn (transrate actually), and providing an adaptive bitrate HLS stream to JW Player, which users will view on our website via Flash or HTML5.
But now trying to get prepared for many simultaneous users for the actual live events and I don’t have the answers OR know how to simulate lots of users for testing. Does the use of CloudFront allow more users (in terms of throughput measured in Mbps and/or connections) to an HTTP feed or just faster access time for the same number of users per Wowza instance? I guess my question is, are we going to need multiple Wowza Media Server instances if we are using CloudFront if we are expecting, let’s just say 1,000 simultaneous users ranging from connections of 2.5Mbps to 400kbps? If you’re needing an exact figure, let’s just say 2,500 Mbps throughput (probably lower but this will be a safe estimate).
If the answer is YES on needing multiple instances, would anyone mind posting how to set up Elastic Load Balancer (or whatever is needed) on EC2 to ingest a single input source but balance over enough instances to allow the target audience to connect with a low latency, smooth video experience? I have been able to find out how to set all of this up on a single Wowza instance (used Hi-CPU XLarge for testing-c1.xlarge), but am not adept enough to provision multiple servers for optimization purposes.
Thanks in advance for any potential guidance. If I’m missing any needed information, please let me know and I’ll reply ASAP.