What would you like to ask Justin.tv?

It looks like I'll have the chance to interview someone tomorrow from Justin.tv about their architecture, which is pretty exciting given their leadership role in live broadcasting. They get 30 million uniques a month, can handle 1 million simultaneous broadcasts and hope to grow another magnitude in the near future. That must take some doing.

Here's your opportunity, especially if you think my questions suck, to ask your own sucky questions :-) What would you like to know about Justin.tv?

Comments

[Tim]

I'm very interested in how they select their network peering, because of this huge amount of traffic. Also it would be fun to know how much bandwidth they waste each month / day, and how they scale on that.

Thanks!

[Marcin]

How many datacenters? Any use of multicast?

[Paul]

How much do they leverage Amazon web services? I know they store profile images there.

[Andrei]

Do they use any tool for configuration management (like puppet or cfengine)?

[Nikolay]

Common architecture. Video streamers used in project. Count and geographic location of servers.

[Daniel]

Do they use commodity hardware?

[Brian]

Do they use Flash Media Server or an open source alternative for handling their streams? What does that system look like?

[Eric]

Todd, could you ask them about their people? What is their structure (teams, traditional tree, flat, etc) within the organization? Is everyone a generalist, or do they get specialists? How specialized are they, ie, is there a network person that only does switches/routers, a firewall team, a server team, os team, etc. How difficult was it for them to grow their people and how did they select them? When do they know they need to get more people?

I also second Marcin on multicast but take it to anycast. If they have multiple locations, are they using anycast so people are routed to the nearest center? How do they have it set up?

What filesystem(s) do they use for storage?

Thanks boss, look forward to results.

[Asaf]

From the MongoDB wiki:

Justin.tv is the easy, fun, and fast way to share live video online. MongoDB powers Justin.tv's internal analytics tools for virality, user retention, and general usage stats that out-of-the-box solutions can't provide.

I would be interested in learning more about their usage states that made them choose a NoSql solution over a regular RDBMS