Keynote: Enabling Real-Time Media in Kubernetes

Media Streaming Mesh is an open-source project that enables real-time media in Kubernetes by deploying real-time media proxies to each Kubernetes node, with a per-cluster control plane ensuring that camera feeds, real-time micro-services, and external viewers are meshed together through the proxies.

• Real-time media applications require minimal loss and jitter when forwarding multi-gigabit media streams between different stages of the media ingest pipeline.
• Media Streaming Mesh addresses these use cases in a cloud-native fashion by deploying real-time media proxies to each Kubernetes node.
• Media Streaming Mesh enables distribution of a video feed to multiple downstream applications in a Kubernetes cluster.
• The media industry has multiple steps in media production, including contribution, encoding, distribution, and final delivery to users.
• Internet streaming works by making HTTP requests and receiving a media playlist with a handful of segments, leading to a trade-off between latency and reliability.

The speaker shared a personal experience of watching football over the top on a streaming platform and receiving a text from a friend watching on cable or satellite about a great goal that the speaker had not yet seen due to the delay in the feed. This illustrates the challenge of distributing live media in real-time and the need for cloud-native techniques to position content closer to end-users.

Kubernetes is an ideal platform for deploying web applications, but lacks some features needed to support real-time media applications.  For example media production requires minimal loss and jitter when forwarding multi-gigabit media streams between different stages of the media ingest pipeline.  Likewise edge video deployments often require each camera feed to be replicated to multiple real-time machine learning applications.  Media Streaming Mesh is an open-source project that addresses these use cases in a cloud-native fashion by deploying real-time media proxies to each Kubernetes node, with a per-cluster control plane ensuring that camera feeds, real-time micro-services, and external viewers are meshed together through the proxies.  In this presentation Giles will give an overview of Media Streaming Mesh and show the first public live demo of the separated control plane / data plane architecture of Media Streaming Mesh being used to distribute a video feed to multiple downstream applications in a Kubernetes cluster.