[streaming-system #56] Dockerize flumotion and support components

[iiie]

More technical details at Streaming System Issue #56

Brief explanation

The streaming system uses flumotion for streaming, we want to put it into a docker container to make distribution and bring up easy.

This project is about making distribution and bring up easy, not about sandboxing / isolation.

Expected results

• Docker image for each type of flumotion system.

Detailed Explanation

Currently we have 1 flumotion per stream. This currently uses 1 machine per stream as managing the configuration of multiple streams on one machine is to hard. If we had docker image we could start up multiple docker containers on a single machine while still having simple configuration setup.

Docker

This project is about making distribution and bring up easy, not about sandboxing / isolation.

Docker is an open-source project to easily create lightweight, portable, self-sufficient
containers from any application. The same container that a developer builds and
tests on a laptop can run at scale, in production, on VMs, bare metal, OpenStack
clusters, public clouds and more.

---

Portable deployment across machines.
Docker defines a format for bundling an application and all its dependencies into a single
object which can be transferred to any Docker-enabled machine, and executed there with
the guarantee that the execution environment exposed to the application will be the same.

---

Application-centric*
Docker is optimized for the deployment of applications, as opposed to machines.
This is reflected in its API, user interface, design philosophy and documentation.

http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/faq/#what-does-docker-add-to-just-plain-lxc

Flumotion in the TimVideos streaming system

There are 3 types of flumotion configurations; they should share a base docker image but also be provides a separate docker image correctly configured.

• Collector - runs on site at a conference and does light encode to compress data so you can send it over the internet to an encoder.
  • Requires dvswitch support.
• Encoder - runs in the cloud and converts video from the light encode format to something suitable for people to view in their browser.
• Repeater/Amplifier - runs in the cloud and streams a copy of the encoder output. Allows the system to scale past the limits of a single machine.

There are a couple of support applications we use with flumotion; these should be installed inside the docker image and started as part of the container.

• watchdog - Restarts failed components and does a full system restart when things go totally wrong.
• register - Registers with the tracker website (so the stream can be found) and sends statistics and logs for reporting and load balancing support.

Further reading

• Docker is a project to make self-sufficient containers from any application
• Memcached as a service, using Docker
• Docker: Using Linux Containers to Support Portable Application Deployment

Knowledge Prerequisites

• Python coding skills.
• Some system administration experience very useful.

Contacts

• Potential Mentors: @iiie @mithro @CarlFK @codersquid
• Mailing list: [email protected]

[mithro]

http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/details/google/gsoc2014/mstritzinger/5668600916475904