Media Cloud uses Amazon EC2 as a host for its media services clusters. Each cluster is managed by one or more load balancers, which control the streaming servers nodes. Each streaming server node runs a Red5 media server, which does processing of incoming and outcoming streams. A media server can also choose to record the broadcasted streams to the Amazon S3 storage in order to serve the streams on-demand afterwards.
The architecture of Media Cloud allows also to incorporate pre- and post-processing servers. Such a server might run some powerful media processing tool, such as FFMPEG, which would post-process the streams. Pre- and post-processing ability could for example optimize the stream, automatically make screenshots, draw static or dynamic overlay graphics like logos, advertisements, etc.. Since the processing servers normally require a lot of system resources, Media Cloud is able of managing clusters of these servers.
This feature opens for our customers a possibility to design and offer services like online video editing software, which is as far as we may see a completely open market at the moment.
We also use Amazon EC2 as a platform for our stress- and load-test infrastructure. In order to guarantee the availability of a stream to >100000 clients we have to simulate such a huge load for the setup system at least once. EC2 gives us of course a perfect infrastructure to solve this issue.