Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service from Amazon that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2 is a cloud-computing platform that virtualizes computing resources as virtual machines. A single virtual machine configuration is registered as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Wowza Media Systems™ provides public AMIs with pre-configured and tuned versions of the Wowza Streaming Engine™ media server software that are ready to start using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Management Console. You can use these AMIs as needed to launch Wowza Streaming Engine for Amazon EC2 instances, paying for your running instance time, storage, and bandwidth only while the instances are running. You can launch Wowza Streaming Engine instances in specific geographic locations that are closer to your audience to reduce latency and in multiple geographic locations to provide high levels of redundancy.
Getting started
Basic familiariarty with how Wowza Streaming Engine works is important before trying to deploy it to a hosted-cloud environment. Install Wowza Streaming Engine locally, try it out, and publish some streams before deploying to Amazon. Click the Free Trial button at the top of this page to get a free Trial license. Then, use the Wowza Streaming Engine getting started articles learn how to install and use the software.
Deploying Wowza Streaming Engine on Amazon EC2
To use Wowza Streaming Engine for Amazon EC2, you must have an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account. After you've created your AWS account, follow the instructions in Set up Wowza Streaming Engine for Linux on Amazon EC2 or Set up Wowza Streaming Engine for Windows on Amazon EC2 to launch your first Wowza Streaming Engine for EC2 instance and stream a sample video.
Integrating Wowza Streaming Engine for Amazon EC2 instances with CloudFront
You can configure applications in your Wowza Streaming Engine EC2 instance as HTTP caching origins to an Amazon CloudFront distribution for delivery of on-demand and live streams using HTTP streaming protocols. A CloudFront distribution is an HTTP caching infrastructure that enables you to distribute content using Amazon's worldwide network of edge locations that provide low latency and high data transfer speeds. CloudFront automatically routes requests for your streams to the edge location that can deliver the stream with the best possible performance.
For information on how to create streaming applications in an EC2 instance and attach them to a CloudFront distribution, see Integrate a Wowza Streaming Engine EC2 instance with CloudFront.
If you've purchased a license for the Wowza Streaming Engine but haven't set up a Wowza Streaming Engine EC2 instance yet, see Bring your Wowza Streaming Engine license to CloudFront live HTTP streaming to learn how to launch Wowza Streaming AMIs from AWS Marketplace that are pre-configured to deliver live HTTP streams through a CloudFront distribution.
Getting help
The Wowza Streaming Engine community forums are a great source of information and expertise on installing and using Wowza Streaming Engine. If you need a helping hand, Wowza technical support engineers around the world are also available to help you achieve success with Wowza Streaming Engine. To enlist help from Wowza, open a Wowza Support Ticket.
Amazon handles billing and payments, and software charges that appear on your monthly AWS billing statement. This includes billing for Amazon EC2 instance usage and bandwidth consumption, Amazon Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3), and Wowza Streaming Engine charges that accrue when using the following licensing models:
- AWS Marketplace - Wowza Streaming Engine 4: Pro Edition (HVM)
- AWS Marketplace - Wowza Streaming Engine 4: Standard
Wowza Media Systems has no insight into how the AWS billing system works. To address Amazon-related billing issues, you must create a support case in the AWS Support Dashboard. For more information about Amazon Web Services, see the AWS Support Center.
Note: The Wowza Streaming Engine 4: Standard option is not available to new subscribers.
