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But having that flexibility to -- you don't have to run two systems, one for people who might interact and say, "Well, you're on the stream that's lagging behind, and you want to ask a question; now we've got to convert you to this other connection and figure that out." There's some play... Especially, I think, in the ... |
Another interesting example is online real-time auctions. They have a lot of people connecting to a call, or just a live auction, and so you need to be able to bid very quickly. Any kind of delay is going to make that a problem. Or sports betting. There's lots of kind of interesting applications if you can transmit vid... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** The one thing which I didn't realize is that we're not talking about one event, we're talking about many simultaneous events. When you add them up, you could have hundreds of thousands of simultaneous participants, because they're all running on the same platform, on the Vex platform, but they're diff... |
So you mentioned HLS. I didn't know about HLS and WebRTC. But you did mention that WebRTC is really important for the low latency. How low are we talking here? what is the difference in latency between HLS and WebRTC? |
**Jason Carter:** \[17:59\] Yeah, so the way that HLS works is - to simplify it, as you're kind of producing video and audio, you're essentially writing chunks of files. And then someone who's actually consuming it is grabbing each chunk of this stream and playing it back. So there's a lot of steps involved to get that... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So the CPU is one issue, and obviously you want to have lots of CPUs and fast CPUs, and not one issue, one challenge... But the other one is the bandwidth. So what are the bandwidth requirements to service 500,000 simultaneous connections? We must be talking terabits per seconds, I think. I think the ... |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah. A lot of times platforms will charge more for those higher-resolution streams, just because that is the major cost, if you think about per minute. So one example that we had was if we had an event with 100,000 people consuming a stream from one user - you could think of a keynote - it would cost... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So now terabits, gigabits. And gigabits per second -- I know that the bandwidth is one of the biggest costs, and it's a hidden cost of cloud providers, because people don't realize just how expensive that stuff is, especially when you have a global audience. Someone from Asia accessing something... |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah, ideally. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Ideally, yeah. Well, plus obviously anything that the protocol uses; you mentioned that's another 200 milliseconds. But the speed of light is a constant, right? You can't exceed that. And even that, it's like 80% of that you get like in real terms. So for that, the bandwidth costs are significant, and... |
**Jason Carter:** \[22:12\] It's much more like 95% bandwidth. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Wow. Okay. |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah, it's very high. one example of, "Hey, let's have one person streaming to one person receiving" - for a whole month of that it would cost about $4.04 in bandwidth, but $0.09 in CPU. That was a strange way to say that, but... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Wow... |
**Jason Carter:** Much, much cheaper. Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Wow. That's crazy. So the ratio is like -- in that case, it's even more than 95%. Right? |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah, it's more like 99% once you get up to that size, yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's crazy. Okay. Okay. Was the cost of bandwidth a factor for you to choose a specific cloud provider? Google versus AWS is what I'm thinking here. |
**Jason Carter:** It's often a case, actually, to choose to not go with a cloud provider. One of the main reasons that we started building on Google is that we had access to those credits. And when we started, we didn't quite really understand, "Hey, what is the bandwidth cost going to be?" A lot of folks in the indust... |
Let's say that we have a stream that needs to come in and then branch out to five different relay servers. Can we sort of bundle up the connections in a smart way? Can we compress them in a smart way? Do we really need to send the full resolution stream to someone who's viewing the presentation, versus someone who's ac... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Right, right. |
**Break:** \[25:00\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Do Imagine yourself running your own bare metal hosts at some point? Do you see that in your future? |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah, I think so. I think being able to have much cleaner control over the network is super-important. I used Kubernetes for a long time, and we found that we ended up having to go straight to VMs, so that we could really understand and not throw a lot of extra-complicated networking layer in between.... |
Another thing that we're kind of excited to explore is - let's say you have a company that requires video and audio infrastructure. They're generally going to need it for a lot of different reasons. Maybe it's for internal meetings, maybe it's for broadcasting out to events... And so if you can provide a system where f... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's a really interesting point that you are alluding to here, the data privacy. So when a user uses Zoom, or Skype, or Microsoft Teams, or whatever you use to communicate with your team, you don't really know which way that communication is flowing, which way the data is flowing. So what if you are... |
**Jason Carter:** \[30:21\] Yeah, it's something that I find really interesting and important to think about. Everyone's probably been through a Zoom call where you get the "This meeting is being recorded", right? Where is that recording happening? Who has access to those recordings? How secure is that. And as I mentio... |
And if you're working in video and audio, I think about how that's super -- it's just very private information. It's something that you want to be absolutely sure that that's safe and secure. And so I think for certain use cases, being able to say, "Hey, we can guarantee that your data is in this region of this cloud p... |
So especially as people had to move online for the pandemic, it feels to me like if we're going to spend a lot of our time in these calls, I want to be sure as a consumer that that data is private, I can use it how I want... I just don't want to open up this door of "Who has access to all this stuff?" And that's just m... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Because you mentioned that, I'm going to read something, and the question to you is who wrote it. "Customers deserve online spaces that aren't isolating, but invigorating. That are real-time. With a lot less "I think you're muted", and a lot more "It just works." You shouldn't have to download and con... |
**Jason Carter:** Ah, I did. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** You did. That's it. That's right. So I think most of us relate to this, right? "Is this working? Can you hear me?" I mean, later, by the way, I may heckle you. "Jason, I can't hear you. Can you repeat that question?" And we'll leave that in the recording. Not now... It's coming. \[laughs\] But that ha... |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah. It's interesting, because you have to think about it differently if you're a platform provider of the technology. So if you're Zoom, you control the entire experience, right? You have a dedicated mobile app development team, dedicated desktop team etc. If you're a company like Vex, you can sort ... |
\[34:24\] I'm always trying to join our kind of internal demo from any device that I can, just to see, "Hey, how does it work on this?" I just got the folding Samsung smartphone, and I've been having a lot of fun playing with that... And that trips up the site quite a lot. People aren't designing for that sort of a sys... |
So the way that I see that it could work is providing super-great tools, whether that's SDKs that work on lots of different platforms, with just sort of like training wheels and safety built-in, where "Hey, if you want to get started and build a better application, just clone this open source repo that has examples of ... |
So long story short, it's challenging, but I think the best way you can do it is make it so that it's much simpler to provide those experiences, so that if someone is kind of using Vex as we hope they would, with our components, then they'll have a good time, and hopefully, that spreads out to more and more application... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So are you imagining your users building things on top of Vex? Or are you imagining users consuming it as end users, more similar to Zoom? Is it both? Is it one versus the other? Which one is it? |
**Jason Carter:** It's definitely more of a platform that folks would build things on top of. So we provide currently a web SDK, so that you can really quickly add to a website video and audio calling. We hope to provide mobile SDKs soon as well; that's very common with other providers in this space. But I think in ord... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, I really like that model. I really like that model, because then you have the freedom of mixing and matching, however you want them, so you're providing building blocks for others to build. They are mostly open source, right? Apart from the platform stuff that you need to run... And I'm sure tha... |
**Jason Carter:** \[38:13\] I'd love to provide a UI component system for video calling; it's surprisingly tough to find a really good video grid that responds super-well, and handles all the different aspect ratios and things... There's just a lot of work involved in that, and different folks take different approaches... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** When it comes to your tech stack, what are you using to run currently Vex.dev? Because if you go there, there's just like a landing page, there's the GitHub where some of these components are available, there's a GitHub org... We will share some of those links in the show notes. But when it comes to y... |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah, so I hope to -- by the time this is published, we'll actually have a link to sign up for our alpha, which I think will be pretty exciting. But right now, those are kind of hidden. In our tech stack at the moment we're big fans of Elixir. So we use Elixir and Phoenix for the majority of the web s... |
And then we use Golang for a lot of our bots, let's say, the ways that we're testing things... But we started out in Elixir, and that wasn't fast enough, and in Python, and that wasn't fast enough... And then of course, a lot of kind of TypeScript/JavaScript stuff on the front end. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Do you feel like Go is giving you all the performance that you may need from a CPU perspective, from a memory perspective? Or are you tempted to go further than Go? |
**Jason Carter:** I think that Go provides pretty great performance. We got a 20x improvement over our same Python code. There's also an absolutely fantastic project called Pion. That's a Go WebRTC implementation; you can build all sorts of crazy things on top of it. I think one of the reasons we might switch out of Go... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[42:30\] I was at a conference recently, it was the Swiss Cloud Native day in Bern... And there was this speaker, Tim McNamara - now, he's pretty big on Rust. And I learned a few things about Rust which I didn't know, and I was genuinely impressed with some of those. He blogs, he writes books, he gav... |
But with the growing popularity of Rust - I mean, shipping in the Linux Kernel itself, that is big. Right? I mean, you can get Rust support in the Linux Kernel... What? I wasn't expecting that... I think it's worth checking out. And again, some conversations with Tim, knowing about Rustler... There's like a lot of hint... |
And the memory is a very interesting approach in Rust. There's no garbage collection, there's none of that. And for like real-time, it makes a difference when real-time is a priority. So I'm just mentioning it, putting it out there, food for thought. Something which I'll check out. |
**Jason Carter:** Yeah, I totally agree. I think the other things that are really interesting to me about Rust is kind of how much focus is put on sort of the WebAssembly side of it as well. One dream that I have - in our testing service, we've built this system to load-test our own system, and we think it might be use... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[46:07\] I don't think it's crazy... I've seen PostgreSQL being shipped in the browser via WebAssembly. I was like, "What?! What are these people doing?" Like, PostgreSQL in the browser? Apparently, yes. So I don't think it's as crazy these days. Yeah, I was reading -- and that's a very good article,... |
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