servervideo-streamingload-balancingubuntu-20.04data-storage

Splitting incoming traffic between multiple servers?


I currently have a single server (480GB storage and 400mb bandwidth) for a clients project, and we are quickly running out of storage space, as well as bandwidth for when we do hls video streaming using an Nginx server once or twice a week.

We have considered upgrading to 2 2TB and 1gb bandwidth servers (a bit of future proofing), to be able to store all their data, and to start compensating for the glitchy streams.

As I am not a systems admin, I don't know much about load balancing and what would be the correct procedure for database and storage, do I clone the contents of one server to the other and split the traffic? Do I dedicate one to database, and another for storage?

Any help, on what services to use to split traffic and any best practices would be much appreciated


Solution

  • Ideally, you would distribute your video streams from a CDN. That way, the only practical limitation on scaling would be cost. Clients would be able to stream directly from nodes near them without having to hit your origin servers directly or very often. The CDN would cache the HLS segments.

    At a minimum, I'd definitely separate your application servers from your video serving. They have different types of load, so you would be wasting money by providing too much CPU to host videos, or too much bandwidth to host an API. Split them up and you can scale independently as required.