Should You Go for a CDN or Managed Streaming Service or Should You Build Your Own Infrastructure?
Should you go for a CDN or managed streaming service or should you build your own infrastructure?
Do you stream to a large audience using the RTMP or WebRTC protocols?
Here at Streamaxia, we get many clients wondering which is the most efficient strategy for them.
The answer is not very straightforward and it highly depends on your business and preferences.
We see two main options:
1. Using a managed service, as a Content Delivery Network, like MUX, Wowza Cloud, Cloudflare and many others.
Pros:
- Reliable service
- Fast time to market
- Doesn’t need any complex setup and sysadmins
- They take care of the security, DDoS protection and load balancing
- Fully scalable — it can support an unlimited amount of connections (theoretically)
Cons:
- The pricing
- You’re limited on the server-side functionality that you can implement.
2. Using your own infrastructure
Pros:
- You can host your infrastructure using unmetered servers
- Fixed monthly costs
- You get to run your server-side scripts, like user authentication, local recording, database connections and advanced server-side functionality
Cons:
- Limited concurrent viewer capacity which needs more capacity (either with the addition of more servers or using CDNs as backup capacity) to accommodate spikes
- You need to manage the infrastructure, to make sure the re-streaming works reliably and keep it safe from DDoS attacks
- A higher complexity which requires the right staff with the right experience
It seems like the decision depends on the amount of bandwidth that you use and what is the peak amount of connections for your streams.
Another factor is whether your company needs advanced functionality to be implemented server-side.
In most cases, startups would find it more efficient to use a CDN given the fast time to market, low costs and low complexities of using a managed service.
For established companies using a high amount of bandwidth or requiring complex server-side functionality, running their infrastructure could make more sense.
Here at Stremaxia, we help companies finding the right solutions to their needs.
Since 2008, we’ve been dedicated to streaming and we understand the market and solutions better than anyone.
And on top of that, we help mobile developers add live-streaming capabilities using RTMP for iOS or RTMP for Android SDKs.
