Choosing the Instance

Type

There many Azure Instance Types, choosing depends on the following:

  • is the content SD or HD?

  • what is the expected dominant output (HLS, Smooth, etc)?

  • is DRM needed?

  • is the output Live or VOD?

  • if Live, what are the bitrates ingested?

  • if Live what is the DVR window size (and would you plan a RAM disk for that)?

In short, ingest is IO bound, and egress first IO bound, then network and lastly CPU.

The Cloud Storage Proxy section outlines how the Unified Origin is optimised for cloud storage access, which is enabled by default since Version 1.11.14 (2022-04-04) GA.

The Cloud Storage Reducing Latency setup uses (local) caching of files. There should be enough RAM for the webserver to start processes/threads to handle cache requests.

The Cloud Storage High Availability outlines how to setup high availability / load balancing which can be complemented by following the Origin shield cache.

Lastly, the performance testing blog outlines how to create a vod setup including an installation script and a script that creates a virtual host with S3 access.

Setup

When you start the instance you need to use a security group where port 80 and port 22 are enabled. The image user name is 'ubuntu' and has sudo access.

To login you need to use ssh (or similar like putty on Windows):

#!/bin/bash

ssh -i your-ssh-key ubuntu@your-azure-instance

Verify

Once the instance has launched and is marked online you should be able to direct your browser to the instance's public DNS name; such a name looks like this:

your-hostname.cloudapp.net

The instance can be tested as described in Verify Your Setup.

On startup the instance tries to set it's external hostname as ServerName for Apache and set the same hostname in the 'index.html' file to address all files and links (the 'index.html' file you can find in /var/www/usp-evaluation).