CWLB
CWLB stands for Centedge WebRTC Load-balancer. It is a general purpose load balancer specially designed for WebRTC powered applications like video conferencing & live streaming. It currently supports mediasoup and AWS/Digitalocean. It is designed for vertical, horizontal, and hybrid auto-scaling while being more resource efficient and flexible than other general purpose load-balancers available today. Our in-house product Meetnow utilities CWLB for auto-scaling mediasoup instances resource efficiently in a production setup. Please visit our Meetnow page to have an instant discussion on CWLB with one of our technical consultants.
Mediasoup as media server
Mediasoup is one of the most capable media servers available out there today with high-performance metrics. It has many cutting edge features like Simulcast & SVC, Congestion control, BWE, Multi-stream capabilities etc.
Horizontal auto scaling
To support horizontal scaling, CWLB creates a new server to cater to a new room creation request when existing server resources are exhausted. Here one room will always exist in one core of an existing media server.
Media sever cascading
A technical jargon, media server cascading is used to keep latency to the minimum. when 2 different users join the same room from 2 different continents, this technique is used to allocate a media server to them in the nearest possible data center and then inter communicate between the media servers to make the call happen. CWLB will have full cascading capabilities in v3 in general Or can be made available to enterprise customers on-demand in current v2.
AWS/Digitalocean as cloud
AWS is a leading cloud provider today which is used by many enterprises, and startups these days as a trusted infrastructure provider with 99.9999% uptime. It also has highly stable APIs for on demand resource allocation. CWLB 2.0 now supports Digitalocean as well for auto-scaling media server instances.
Vertical auto scaling
To support vertical scaling, CWLB creates a new server when no existing server can cater to the new user join request for an existing room. Here one room with a large number of users can exist in multiple cores of an existing media servers.
Hybrid auto-scaling
This strategy is a clever combination of both horizontal and the vertical scaling approach.Here the vertical scaling approach is used to scale one room to all available cores in a mediasoup instance in case of a need. Once this mediasoup instance is totally occupied, but still the same room needs more resources, the horizontal scaling is used to scale to different mediasoup instance located in separate host. For all the new resource allocation requests for the same room, the new server is then used according to the vertical scaling strategy until and unless the first server has free resources to spare. This hybrid approach is typically useful for very large rooms like large event rooms where the load-balancer needs to cater to 100s / 1000s of concurrent users in one room in a complete just in time resource request mode.
Using CWLB
CWLB can be integrated very easily into any video application using APIs. It currently comes with 4 different variations.
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CWLB Horizontal scaling:
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CWLB Vertical scaling
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CWLB Hybrid scaling
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CWLB Hybrid+ scaling
Either monthly or yearly licensing options can be used to integrate CWLB within your application.
CWLB Horizontal Scaling
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This can be integrated in to any application without any major change in the either frontend of backend part of your application with less than 10 lines of code.
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It can effortlessly use the second media server available in the load balancer as soon as the 1st media server is fully utilised. It can re-utilise the resources released from the 1st media server as and when it happens.
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This load balancing strategy is suitable if the need is for more number of rooms with relatively small number of participants in each individual room.
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Ex: A video contact centre need to run 200+ video rooms simultaneously but each video room would have 2~ 5 participants in each.
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Licenses start from $599 / month Or $5999 / year
CWLB Vertical Scaling
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This can be integrated in to any application without any major change in the either frontend of backend part of your application with less than 10 lines of code.
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Your current mediasoup media server code will be fully replaced by the CWLB vertical load-balancer which will come with an integrated mediasoup media server.
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Here we assume that your current media server code is completely stateless i.e. there are no business logic apart form media stream handling in your current media server code. If there are business logics in your existing mediasoup media server, that need to be separated first before moving on to vertical load balancing. We can help you first separate your business logic from the media server before implementing CWLB vertical load balancer, at a reasonable extra cost.
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This load balancing strategy is suitable if the need is for less of rooms with relatively large number participants in each individual room.
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Ex: A school need to run only 10 class rooms simultaneously but each classroom would have 50 ~ 75 students in each.
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Licenses start from $599 / month Or $5999 / year
CWLB Hybrid Scaling
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Hybrid scaling is a load balancing strategy which is a combination of horizontal and vertical load balancing.
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Here both CWLB horizontal and vertical will be integrated as a combined package for effective handling of real time load.
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This approach generally leads to most efficient media server resource usage which may not be possible with either a horizontal or a vertical load balancing strategy only.
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This load balancing strategy is suitable if the need is for a lot of simultaneous rooms with relatively large number of participants in each individual room.
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Ex: A virtual / hybrid event organiser need to run 100+ event rooms simultaneously with each event room having ~100 participants in each.
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Licenses start from $1099 / month Or $10999 / year
CWLB Hybrid+ Scaling
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The Hybrid+ scaling strategy uses all the techniques that is used in the hybrid scaling strategy.
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This option comes with a lot more automation to the overall infrastructure.
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It has an additional relay server in-between the client and the media server to make the media servers completely stateless.
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Capable of creating and destroying media servers on demand using APIS of AWS / Digitalocean as cloud provider.
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Capable of utilising the JIT load distribution strategy for maximum efficiency.
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Capable of utilising advanced techniques like media server cascading for keeping the latency to the minimum while catering to a global user base. Simultaneous media servers need to run in different geographies to enable cascading.
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Capable of HA(High Availability) setup where standby media servers can take up the load when the primary media servers fails while in use.
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This load balancing strategy is suitable for medium / large scale enterprises where the everyday usage of the service will be more as minimum 5-10 media servers need to run simultaneously to fully utilise the capabilities of this setup.
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Custom licensing terms.
Note: Our in-house product Meetnow uses Hybrid+ scaling strategy without cascading in the current v2 release of CWLB. Cascading will be available in the v3 release of CWLB for Meetnow.