Automate Your Wowza Streaming Engine VOD Workflow with Amazon S3

Imagine you have dozens, or even hundreds, of live stream recordings to manage. Now what? Maybe you have a workflow in place, but now you need to scale your post-production processes. How can you streamline your workflow so recorded assets are available reliably and quickly? Automate the transfer of assets to Amazon S3.

Your audience will want to know if an event is being recorded—whether they’re watching live or are unable to attend in real time and want to watch later. For the best possible user experience, no matter your audience size, you need to make your recordings available reliably and quickly after the live event.

Here’s how to automate uploading your recordings from Wowza Streaming Engine to an Amazon S3 bucket for an efficient workflow. ModuleS3Upload for Wowza Streaming Engine software automatically uploads finished recordings to an Amazon S3 bucket, using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) SDK for Java. Amazon S3 TransferManager allows you to specify limits for when to split your recording, thus enabling higher performance with multithreaded multipart uploads. Without splitting your recordings, each file would be transferred one at a time sequentially. If you split your recording into parts, then multiple parts can be uploaded concurrently, taking advantage of your network bandwidth.

Don’t worry if there is an interruption mid-transfer. In the world we live in, things don’t always go smoothly. If an app instance restarts, the transfer process will resume at the break point. If the transfer is a multipart upload, then it will restart after the the last uploaded part and save you from having to start a the very beginning of the file.

Whether your Wowza server is deployed on AWS, another provider, or on premises, you can use ModuleS3Upload to automate your on-demand delivery workflow with S3. If you have high storage needs, S3 buckets are a solid choice.

Code for ModuleS3Upload is available on GitHub. The Wowza article How to Upload Recorded Media to an Amazon S3 Bucket has configuration and property information. A compiled .jar file is also available for easy deployment for system administrators—just copy files to your system, configure, and restart. See the Wowza Streaming Engine Java API articles for other ways to automate common Wowza server workflows.