DevOps for Video Streaming Services and Online Education

With the world on quarantine, there is a high demand for video streaming services and online education platforms and IT Svit has the needed DevOps expertise to deploy them.

Video streaming in general, and its subset dedicated to online education in particular, is on the ever-increasing demand for the last decade. YouTube is not all about gaming and funny cats videos — it is full of useful videos covering all aspects of education, from roasting steaks and baking pies to programming and DIY projects like making a shingle roof with your own hands. 

However, many people need to have certificates proving their knowledge, and YouTube does not issue ones. On the other hand, there are platforms dedicated specifically to online education — like Open edX, Coursera, Moodle, Udemy and others. These solutions offer access to a huge variety of courses from world-leading universities and individual experts, and videos form a huge part of educational materials used there. One such hundred hours-long course can have several dozens of gigabytes worth of video materials, and eLearning platforms usually provide thousands of courses.

Thus, there is a need to build infrastructure for eLearning platforms, capable of handling thousands of learners instantaneously, store terabytes of learning materials, provide secure access to ensure the safety of financial details for learners and educators who will pay for certificates and get paid for uploading courses and tutoring students, etc.

The same goes for enabling video streaming services — companies big and small need them to stay connected to their personnel and provide access to their video conferencing products and service to their customers. Thus said, both video streaming and online education require building secure, easily scalable and highly resilient systems, which is exactly what DevOps expertise is all about.

Why do you need DevOps for video streaming and online education?

Whether your product or service involves enabling online conferencing for your customers or provides streaming/restreaming, this platform will have specific needs and characteristics:

• it has to be run in the cloud to ensure scalability on demand
• it has to be secure to ensure financial transactions are safe
• it has to enable easy monitoring to keep an eye on system performance 

This is how IT Svit enables this functionality:

• We containerize video streaming apps in Docker containers to ensure they spend the absolute minimum of resources and run them on Kubernetes clusters to enable simple scaling up and down.
• We use AWS Load Balancer or its open-source alternatives like Nginx and ELB to ensure all the system nodes receive equal traffic and nothing fails due to overload
• We enable auto-scaling groups to provide your systems with the capacity to function at scale
• We use Amazon Key Management System or HashiCorp Vault to store secrets, ensuring the secure keeping of your customer’s personal details and security of billing operations
• We build CI/CD processes using Jenkins Workers and pipelines to automate product development and infrastructure management operations
• We deploy bastion hosts to ensure your infrastructure runs in a private subnet and cannot be accessed from outside with malicious intent
• We provide granular control of user access rights due to in-depth customization of Kubernetes Policies, ensuring safe functioning of your platforms
• We configure in-depth real-time monitoring using platform-specific (AWS CloudWatc, Google StackDriver) or open-source tools (AlertManager, Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios, Icinga, Datadog, etc.) to ensure maximum transparency of the system performance 
• We can implement Big Data analytics to provide our customers with actionable insights on their infrastructure operations and help them minimize expenses due to cost-efficient predictive analytics at scale (we train Machine Learning models to automatically scale the system up and down based on demand)
• We deliver clean and cost-efficient integration with third-party modules through RESTful APIs to ensure you get a feature-rich and functional product
• We create detailed developer documentation to simplify expertise transition to your team and provide long-term support and ongoing development for your products on request.

Thus said, IT Svit team has ample experience with building, releasing, configuring and supporting video streaming products and online education systems. We have accomplished a variety of such products and many companies have left positive IT Svit customer reviews on Clutch. 

This reputable international technology consultancy currently ranks IT Svit №1 IT outsourcing service provider in Ukraine and the leading Managed DevOp service provider worldwide. We stand ready to assist your business with any DevOps-related tasks or provide dedicated teams for handling any other aspect of your next project. Contact us today and let’s start working on your video streaming or online education project tomorrow!