Hybrid streaming sessions – free and open

Wondering what the title means?

Free and public stream sessions I have taken a lot of and organised also. Most recently also I had delivered a session at a hybrid technical event. Out of the five total sessions, two were remote, and the others in-person. This article explores my outline towards a very low-cost solution to handle the same situation. To summarize the options are as follows. Will go in detail about each of the functions and steps as the article proceeds.

  • Live Stream (Linkedin, YouTube, Twitch and endless others)
  • AWS Cloud Front and AWS Media Services
  • OBS Studio (Free broadcaster)
  • BigBlueButton (FOSS video conferencing solution)
  • AWS EC2 / Fargate (Hosting of BigBlueButton)
  • AWS Route53 (DNS and Domain)
  • AWS CloudFront (Low latency endpoints)
  • LetsEncrypt (Free SSL)
  • DroidCam (Use mobile as a Camera for OBS)

There are multiple documents and detailed setup information for almost all the tools referenced available on the internet. I followed several ones to configure the suit and finally almost there, now its only setting up my studio room that is pending which would be completed by early 2023 and start some video sessions with live on YouTube or LinkedIn.

OBS Studio can be installed as per the KB Article Install Instructions on the obs project site. Live Streaming to AWS Media Services can be configured by referring to the blog article Connecting OBS Studio to AWS Media Services in the Cloud written by Dan Gehred and Steve Ward. The article How to broadcast to LinkedIn with OBS on Restream is a good read and reference to configure OBS broadcasting to LinkedIn.

BigBlueButton is an open source video conference system that supports various audio and video formats and allows the use of integrated video-, screen- and document-sharing functions. BigBlueButton has features for multi-user whiteboards, breakout rooms, public and private chats, polling, moderation, emojis, and raise-hands. The blog post How to build a scalable BigBlueButton video conference solution on AWS by David Surrey and Bastian Klein gives full instructions as to how the BigBlueButton video conferencing solution can be installed and run on AWS Ec2. The authors continue to explain how AWS customers who are looking for a self-managed and open-source software-based video conference solution can leverage AWS to build and deploy a scalable BigBlueButton setup. They also explain how to use the necessary scripts and stack templates.

There is much more to explore on the basis of these but I am satisfied with what I already have and will try to bring out a full demo or video tutorial on how I configured the whole thing at a later stage. With dedication towards my official status and the vacations and mundane things related to activities at my #organic Farm and during the start of 2023 would be a bit too busy restructuring my workshop room into a serviceable studio.

EBS Provisioning VS Performance – Confusions cleared

For almost over the last decade ( since 2009 ), I was never worried about the EBS performance indexes. Used to create a single volume and attached to an instance as and when required. Today just for wandering, and to entertain myself, did a couple of tests. Thanks to aws-cli without which this could have taken more than what it would.

Straight into what I found in a short summary. Note that the values are Bps.

T1T2T3T4T5T6T7
Single272M492M268M1.3G393K272M8954.02M
Raid 0631M671M740M1.3G366K631M8851.47
Raid 5336M250M332M1.2G9.9k315M8306.52
Performance across different combination of EBS Volumes

Kicked up an EC2 instance and mounted a 200gb EBS volume to run a series of tests. Thanks to nixCraft article titled “Linux and Unix Test Disk I/O Performance With dd Command“.

Continue reading “EBS Provisioning VS Performance – Confusions cleared”