Google Cloud architecture and Alibaba, 4K video in real time

This challenging project led us to implement a Google and Alibaba multicloud architecture to distribute live and real-time FullHD video supporting over 500,000 concurrent users with loading times of less than 5 seconds.

Multicloud Architecture and Geoproximity

We designed a highly resilient multicloud infrastructure, optimized to cover both the global and Chinese markets, ensuring high performance wherever users are.

Main goals:

• Improve performance globally and in China.
• Ensure high availability and automatic scalability.
• Separate application layers for efficiency and security.

Architecture in Brief:

• Geographic Routing: GeoDNS routes users to the nearest datacenter.
• Global Load Balancer: Centralized management of HTTP/S traffic with SSL termination.
• Frontend Webapp distributed in 4 regions (Google Cloud in Europe, USA, Southeast Asia, Alibaba Cloud in Shanghai).
• CentralizedBackend and Database in Europe (GCP - Germany) for secure data management.
• Dedicateddevelopment environment connected to the backend.

Strengths:

• ✅ Global and local performance: fast coverage for worldwide and Chinese users.
• ✅ Dynamic autoscaling: load-optimized resources.
• ✅ High availability: redundancy across multiple regions and providers.
• ✅ Real Multicloud: secure and transparent integration between Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud.
• ✅ Security and separation: secure backend and isolated DEV environment.

1. Challenges.

The project proposes several challenges:

• Distribute fullHD, live, real-time video worldwide.
• Support more than 500,000 concurrent users.
• To achieve page load times of less than 5 seconds globally.

To support load, deployment time and bandwidth requirements, we designed and implemented a dedicated auto-scaling Google and Alibaba multicloud architecture. Several distribution points were created in multiple global regions, accelerated by CDNs.

2. Realization of the Google and Alibaba multicloud architecture

To realize the multi-cloud architecture, we followed these steps:

1. Creation of the Debian Linux backend with ISPConfig, NginX, PHP and MySQL.
2. Implementation of a centralized logserver.
3. Configuration of frontend images.
4. Stress testing on single instance.
5. Content and virtual host synchronization management.
6. Instance group creation and configuration of load balancers and autoscaling.
7. DNS configuration to route traffic based on geographic proximity.
8. Replication of frontends on Alibaba Cloud and management of latency in synchronization due to Great Firewall of China.
9. Configuration of Google, Akamai and Level3 CDNs.
10. Creation of instance pools for automated and scalable stress testing.
11. Load data analysis and architecture optimization.

3. Tools and cloud providers used

We chose to use a Google and Alibaba multi-cloud architecture to benefit from the capabilities offered by both platforms, available regions, and advanced networking. Google Cloud Platform was used as the primary infrastructure, while Alibaba Cloud was used mainly in China.

4. Software employed in the architecture

We selected the NginX webserver for its speed and lightness, the ISPConfig control panel for management of virtual hosts by the client's development department, and rsyslog for the central log server. Stress tests were performed in parallel on cloud instances using ad-hoc scripts based on Apache Bench and Siege.

5. Testing and results in production

From the tests, a standard dual-core Google Cloud instance was found to handle over 11,000 requests per second. In production, the architecture exceeded 500,000 active users.
Page load times in China were reduced by 92 percent, from 38.6 seconds to 3.1 seconds.

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