Abstract: The 2018 Asia-Pacific CDN Summit was grandly held in Beijing. In the operator forum on the morning of April 12, Zhang Shibo, a senior technical expert of Alibaba Cloud's edge computing team, gave a keynote speech on "The Solution of Delay-Free Live Broadcasting Based on PCDN Technology". This article is the content of the speech. When people talk about live broadcast, they are generally surprised by the scale of live broadcast development in recent years, especially from 2016 to 2017, the growth rate of live broadcast users has reached 22.6%, the overall scale of users has reached 420 million, and the revenue has reached RMB 300. More than 100 million, the development trend is very gratifying.
The 2018 Asia-Pacific CDN Summit was grandly held in Beijing. In the operator forum on the morning of April 12, Zhang Shibo, a senior technical expert of Alibaba Cloud's edge computing team, gave a keynote speech on "The Solution of Delay-Free Live Broadcasting Based on PCDN Technology". This article is the content of the speech.
When people talk about live broadcast, they are generally surprised by the scale of live broadcast development in recent years, especially from 2016 to 2017, the growth rate of live broadcast users has reached 22.6%, the overall scale of users has reached 420 million, and the revenue has reached RMB 300. More than 100 million, the development trend is very gratifying.
In 2017, there were two upsurges. The first was to catch dolls, and the second was to answer questions, both of which pushed live video streaming to a new level. At the same time, live streaming also has a very broad space for development. Pan-entertainment has gradually been deeply integrated with vertical industries, and has shifted from entertainment to various aspects related to the national economy and people's livelihood, such as e-commerce, online education, and media.
At the same time as the development of live broadcast, the market has actually put forward higher requirements for user experience, performance and cost. I think that as a technology of PCDN, we can contribute our own strength in terms of cost and experience, especially in the future. In the development, we believe that the delay ability of live broadcast will greatly affect the user experience. Therefore, in today's sharing, I will introduce the non-delay live broadcast solution based on PCDN technology.
Content sinks in depth, traffic localization is the future trend
PCDN is a technology based on P2P, which takes advantage of the massive idle resources in the edge network to fully explore their capabilities, thus forming our low-cost, high-quality distribution network, which will greatly reduce the backbone network. The traffic consumption between them will promote the sinking of our traffic depth and the trend of traffic localization, thereby greatly improving the resource utilization of the edge network and improving the speed of distribution.
Generally speaking, in the past, CDNs were mostly deployed in first- and second-tier cities. The experts from China Mobile just said that we are now deploying to third-tier, fourth-tier, and even fifth-tier and sixth-tier cities. In fact, we also deeply agree with this point of view. It is believed that in order to serve customers well in the future, our content must be deeply sinking, and traffic localization is also a future trend.
Our PCDN is actually deeply integrated with CDN. We can use PCDN technology to make use of various advantageous resources in a large number of third- and fourth-tier, fifth- and sixth-tier cities, and allocate this capability through a flexible system. The final video Resources and live broadcast resources are meshed between the cloud, CDN and PCDN networks, and we are different from ordinary connections. We are a multi-point multi-path method, which can achieve a higher success rate and smoother rate. high effect.
PCDN positioning: expand the boundaries of CDN and bring content closer to you
We believe that PCDN is a Paas product in the edge computing matrix. It expands the boundaries of CDNs and enables content distribution capabilities to reach the user's community and even reach the user's home.
PCDN's support for live broadcast has obvious advantages. First, on the scheduling side, Alibaba Cloud has the ability to manage hundreds of millions of nodes. Through resource optimization, it can allocate the most suitable nodes for consumption points. At the same time, there are many algorithms on the terminal, such as sub-streaming, fragmentation algorithms, and multi-point and multi-path connections, which can better support live broadcast, and a single program can support millions of simultaneous online.
In fact, there is another point of P2P. We choose so many nodes with different characteristics, and the difference in cost is very big. Using these characteristics, through our scheduling algorithm and connection service, we can finally achieve a high sharing rate. At the same time, because the node is very close to the user and the distance from the user is very close, PCDN is close to zero delay in live broadcast delay.
PCDN is both a cloud product and an end-to-end product. In terms of terminal, PCDN has accumulated and established a complete terminal system after years of technical accumulation and in-depth integration and polishing with customer business.
Because the terminal products are oriented to different types of terminals, especially the heterogeneity of the terminals, such as device heterogeneity, platform heterogeneity, software heterogeneity, and different players, PCDN adopts a generalized processing method. The biggest is to achieve a compatibility. Therefore, PCDN has achieved a very comprehensive status in terms of media protocol support, media format, platform support and terminal support, and the live and on-demand solutions provided are also relatively mature and comprehensive.
Reasonable ratio according to the principle of "quality first, taking into account cost"
PCDN可以实现基于后台调度，选择优质节点进行传输。对于分布在网上各种各样的节点设备的统一管理，PCDN采用了对三个能力进行单元化处理的模型，像计算能力、带宽能力和存储能力，从而实现用一致的方法来为整个系统进行调度。
在直播开始阶段，PCDN优选出来的首批优质节点，可以快速的让终端连上这些节点，迅速的拿到首播数据，从而达到很好的输出效果。在播放的过程中，我们用自己的智能算法找出那些性价比更高的节点来逐步的加入，使这个能力越来越强，从而达到了播放体验和成本之间的很好平衡。
简单易用 保障有力
在技术和产品在发展的过程中，除了靠自身对于技术的不断追求和迭代之外，实际上也经常被客户所教育和引导。一个好的产品，从客户的角度来看一定是简单方便、容易使用的、支持完善的，这几点也是我们研发的动力。在SDK简单易用性、控制台实操方面，我们做了大量的工作，让SDK的接口调用更简单，并提供了完整详尽的文档与售后支持。
在客户的业务场景中，对业务层数据的跟踪和监控是十分重要的，依托于阿里云的数据处理能力，能够实时的去监控到线上发生的各种情况，进行自动修复和危险预警。
还有一点客户比较关心的是，对单点故障的排除能力和定位能力。在这方面PCDN利用端的底层的技术，能够分析和汇报有关网络方面的各个特征，同时对整个链路进行分级操作，实现提取客户关心的用户画像等特征等增值服务。
以上就是张士波在技术角度，对PCDN无延时直播解决方案的特点阐述。
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