The Real-Time Messaging Protocol or RTMP was originally developed by Macromedia and later acquired by Adobe as a low latency TCP based protocol which is able to effectively deliver audio, video and data. Due to the decline of Flash in recent years, RTMP use has also decreased in popularity as newer protocols such as HLS or DASH have become more widely used (along with RTSP) for low latency streaming.

The main difference between the RTMP and the HLS protocols is that during the streaming process an active connection is opened when a TCP connection is established. The RTMP connection begins when a handshake occurs, it consists of three packets which are exchanged by the server and the client. This is slightly different when compared to the playback of HTTP streams which function based on a buffer of cached chunks downloaded from a streaming server.

With the rise of client-side encoding software such as Open Broadcaster Software, RTMP has played a transit stream role instead of the primary stream playback role. RTMP is then transcoded into a format such as HLS which is optimized for delivery and end-user playback, since it is based on a manifest that contains video tracks consisting of individual segments, which are also able to be easily cached by a CDN. It is the ideal choice for delivering video to multiple video devices, using various internet speeds.

What is Real-Time Messaging Protocol and how does it work?

At CDN77, we accept a range of ingest signals including RTMP which we are able to then transcode into a format optimized for CDN Delivery. Converting your RTMP stream into HTTP protocols creates additional support for adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) and playback compatibility on a wide range of desktop and mobile devices, including iOS and Android.

We can accept an RTMP Push stream from your encoding software or we are also able to pull an existing RTMP Stream. It is also possible to simultaneously restream your RTMP stream onto third party streaming sites such as Youtube or Facebook. 

Get in touch with us to discuss your specific use. We'll set up a tailored free trial and work on a custom quote with you.

Learn what is Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) and how does it fit into your streaming workflow.

Learn what is Real-Time Messaging Protocol and how does it fit into your streaming workflow.

In the ever-evolving landscape of content delivery networks, we understand the importance of giving you, our clients, the right tools you need to be more autonomous in your operations. That’s why we’re eager to introduce a significant advancement that puts the power squarely in your hands: CDN77 Edge Computing.

Building upon standard solutions, this platform allows you to customize online interactions according to your business and technical goals, ensuring high performance and security. We aim to empower you with complete control over how our edge servers transform, cache, and handle HTTP requests.

This blog post will explore the essence of CDN77 Edge Computing and the challenges we overcame during its development. We know that for many clients this is a game changer, so we’re launching a beta access program. You can already reach out to your account manager or sales to apply for beta access. We would love to hear your feedback or feature suggestions for your specific use case.

As we specialize in content delivery, we depend heavily on our infrastructure. We operate thousands of edge servers running across the globe. This infrastructure is supported by a 130 Tbps network with a global private backbone.

It’s no secret that our edge servers are powered by our fork of Nginx enhanced with OpenResty. This dynamic combination empowers our servers to store and deliver content efficiently. It offers advanced customization capabilities through real-time manipulation of HTTP requests and responses, ensuring optimal performance and tailored content delivery for every user.

Through our client panel or an extensive API, it’s possible to set up various features, rules and basic request manipulation. These configurations are then propagated to our edge servers and executed when needed. These configs’ technical implementation usually combines Lua scripts and Nginx configurations.

For customers who need more advanced or tailored configurations that aren’t generally available from our API, we have a Support Team that can configure almost any request or routing transformation.

While our API covers most of the common use cases of HTTP request transformation, we wanted to offer more. Our customers know what is best for them and should be allowed to manipulate their requests however they want, whenever they want, in a secure and isolated manner. Essentially, we wanted to give them full autonomy in what they can do themselves and let them see and debug routing changes instantly.

Our focus in designing the Edge Computing platform was to be able to transform requests securely and dynamically. We also needed to load new modifications and plugins dynamically on the fly without influencing or slowing down anything else running on our edge servers. Additionally, we wanted our plugins to work and seamlessly integrate with Nginx, allowing us to adjust virtually any internal behavior as needed.

Another goal was to be able to express any business logic that the client would ever need. Therefore, we want to be able to execute actual code and not be limited by basic grammar and expression. However, this decision posed a challenge: How to execute untrusted code safely without compromising the security of our servers?

Running untrusted code in a trusted environment is hard. Ensuring proper isolation and sandboxing mechanisms to prevent unauthorized access to system resources, like files, network, or customer data, demands meticulous attention to detail and can be complex to implement effectively. Moreover, we need to be running untrusted code fast.

While designing our platform, we considered using isolated processes, microVMs or even containers. We found isolated processes not safe enough for our use case. MicroVMs are secure but bring other challenges like long cold starts and slow communication between plugins and our Nginx. Running containers might help with the cold starts and communication overhead, but it's still light years behind our final choice.

The answer for our use case lies in the binary world - WebAssembly.

WebAssembly (Wasm) is an ideal choice for executing untrusted code on servers due to its sandboxed and efficient design. Wasm provides a low-level binary instruction format that can be executed at near-native speed, ensuring high performance for diverse workloads. The sandboxing mechanism of Wasm provides a secure execution environment that isolates untrusted code from the host system, mitigating potential security risks and preventing unauthorized access to resources.

Wasm’s platform-independent architecture enables code portability across different servers and platforms. Combining that with performance and security, Wasm ensures that untrusted code can be executed reliably and efficiently within a controlled sandbox virtually anywhere.

As a portable format, one only needs a Wasm runtime to execute Wasm plugins. After extensive research, we decided to use Wasmtime as our runtime. It is written in Rust (❤️), with SDK in C, battle-tested, and can be embedded in an already-running process.

One of the many metrics used to measure the performance of a CDN is latency and response time. While building our Edge Computing platform, the main objective was to keep these metrics down and avoid increasing the general infrastructure load. To do that, we decided to run Edge Computing plugins as close as possible to the infrastructure edge, and Nginx is the first place that can understand L7 data and process it. That’s one of the reasons why we decided to embed Wasmtime directly into our Nginx. Nginx Workers processes can now load and execute Wasm plugins and utilize the full power of Wasmtime while keeping the communication overhead between the plugin and the Nginx close to zero.

These are just our examples. You can run virtually any logic that you and your business need. Feel free to utilize the power of thousands of our edge servers and their proximity to the end users.

Let’s explore some examples in Rust. These are the plugins or their variants we’ve been using and deploying to production for some time.

As we journey into the future of web services and content delivery, CDN77’s new Edge Computing platform is set to evolve and expand, bringing more power and flexibility to developers and businesses alike. With a strong foundation already in place, the following features are under active development and will be available soon to the beta testers.

Because any generic computing platform needs to be able to persist data, we’re working on distributed, eventually consistent key-value storage and distributed SQLite database. Persistent distributed storage is currently our priority number one.

We currently have a feature-complete SDK for Rust, Golang, and AssemblyScript. Our JavaScript and Typescript SDKs are still in their infancy, but we plan to open and publish them shortly. Eventually, we plan to deliver even more SDKs for Wasm-enabled languages to make it easy for developers to deploy to our platform using languages they’re familiar with.

While our Edge Computing platform is designed to handle incoming requests to our CDN, we plan to expand its capabilities to enable the dispatch of HTTP requests in the future.

Given our extensive global infrastructure, we aim to provide even greater utility to our customers than is currently possible. One of the ways we're planning to do that is to provide support for server-side rendering frameworks such as Next.js, Nuxt, or SvelteKit.

We hope you share our excitement about the expansive new possibilities opened up by CDN77 Edge Computing. We've been heavily testing both internally and with selected customers for almost a year. We served billions of requests and petabytes of traffic through this platform. In fact, this very site was served to you by one of our edge computing plugins.

We'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions, so do not hesitate to contact us and tell us how you would like to utilize this platform.

We aim to empower you with complete control over how our edge servers transform, cache, and handle HTTP requests. Read our blog!

We aim to empower you with complete control over how our edge servers transform, cache, and handle HTTP requests.

See what our 2021 looked like. Numbers grow, the goal stays the same – to deliver a stellar client service to you and the best possible online experience to your users. Thank you for trusting in us. 

Continuous improvement of product and service aspects is a standard for most tech enterprises; pricing, however, often remains overlooked. Yet this is exactly what sets market leaders apart – their ability to quickly adapt and respond to client’s changing business needs.

At CDN77, all of our clients now benefit from having overage fees set at the unit price of their CDN traffic plan. What’s more is that they enjoy the freedom to easily upgrade or downgrade their plans on a monthly basis. 

This month we've accomplished our long-term goal – a pricing reform where all of our clients have their overage (additional data that exceeds your subscribed traffic volume) fees equal to the unit price of their chosen plan.

When our clients consume more traffic than they subscribe to, we don’t see that as data excess, we would rather see that as growth that we’re here to support.

Let’s see an example. Imagine you’re subscribed to a 3,000TB Plan at $6,600 per month. This means your unit price is $2.2/TB ($6,600/3,000TB). When you transfer more than 3,000TB of traffic in a given month – let’s say 3,500TB – the additional 500TB will be charged at the same rate ($2.2/TB) as the previous 3,000TB. So, your final payment would be $7,700 ($2.2 * 3,500TB).

Over the course of the past 12 months we applied this pricing model to our Custom and High Volume plans. Preset Monthly Plans adjustment marked the end of the transition process this summer, which effectively means that the overage fees are now capped at the unit price for all of CDN77's plans.

Internet usage has never been predictable. The 48% increase in global internet traffic during the 2020 pandemic is a powerful demonstration of traffic volatility. 

At CDN77, we reckon with changes in websites’ and apps’ popularity, traffic seasonality as well as sudden peaks in visits. 

While our 70Tbps+ network absorbs any unexpected traffic surges from the capacity point of view, we make sure to reflect traffic unpredictability also in pricing.

In practice it means that our clients have the freedom to flexibly upgrade or downgrade their traffic plan on a monthly basis according to their actual needs. With no rigid commitments in place, you get the optimal pricing solution, whether you’re experiencing rapid growth or going through a lower traffic span.

For example, you might need a 800 TB/month plan for January, then you can downgrade to 550 TB/month in February and upgrade to 3,500 TB/month in March – if that's how your traffic consumption works, it’s no problem for us.

The combination of flexible plan switching and flat rates for overage traffic makes CDN77 a partner to rely on in all stages of your business.

Adjust Your Plan According to Current Traffic Needs

We’re committed to finding the best fitting solution for all of our clients by consulting their individual use-cases, on both technical and pricing levels. If you’d like to learn more about our services, reach out to our Client Solutions team at clientsolutions@cdn77.com.

With CDN77 you now benefit from flat overages and enjoy the flexibility to change your traffic plans on a monthly basis. Read for more details.

High Overage Fees & Rigid Commitments are Passé at CDN77

RTMP and its Role in Video Delivery

What is Real-Time Messaging Protocol and how does it work?

RTMP transcoding and ABR compatibility