September 2, 2010

Make your Videos playback faster with S3/CloudFront

In our class today for members (sorry this is not for Day Pass users), I am going to walk you through the key steps in using S3 and CloudFront to deliver your rich media files in RapidWeaver (in my example today we are using video)

Now , I have been using S3 ever since it was first launched a couple of years ago in addition to the more recent CloudFront service. The initial videos we delivered when starting SupportCasts were delivered over S3. However, we now use a commercial CDN offering too but our image storage is handled by S3 for all those who want to know.

Whilst I will not go into the boring details of signing up , if you have an Amazon.com account you are almost there as these are extra add-on services. What I will show you is the following:

  • S3 setup with the AWS management console
  • bucket creation
  • File permissions
  • configuring CloudFront
  • using the media file in RapidWeaver.

After going through the initial setup,  using S3 is a breeze and you will find it is a useful addition to compliment your web hosting which may not be so hot in delivering rich media in other words not great bandwidth throughput and general scalability which is always a problem with shared hosting. Not unless you running your own VPS ;)

Brace yourself for a nice 18 minutes of geeky fun, mistakes and all, and let us know what you think about delivering your videos over CloudFront/S3 (c’mon folks it was a rainy Sunday afternoon here).

Have fun and remember this lesson is only available for 6 and 12 month memberships.

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VPS.net Rolling Out CDN – A Getting Started Guide

Internet - Blue_128x128Free Public Cast. :)
I have been testing out the new CDN (Content Delivery Network) service offering from the team at VPS.net .

So far , I am really impressed by the speed and page response times at my own (currently testing) site as well as the speed of delivering media files zippy fast.

At SupportCasts.com we are going to be migrating  our content (CSS, javascripts, media) over to this enhanced delivery method as it will help improve our viewers experience around the world, delivering our content from POP’s (Points of Presence ) closer to them.

I have created these intro videos to help other users out there get to grips with the seemingly daunting task of setting up their CDN account .

Part 2 will deal with Flash RTMP streaming and testing with FlowPlayer and one of the numerous plugins for WordPress also…  ;)

The product itself  is not yet available  , judging by the web site at VPS.net but stay tuned to further updates on their page.

Watch the video provide any feedback or comments on the VPS.net forums or right here on the blog page. A special thanks to Carlos for our numerous email exchanges on CDN :)

Part 1

Part 2 – Flash Setup

Well I hope you have enjoyed these brief screencasts on how to get up and running on the Vps.Net CDN.

Again stay tuned to their pages on when this is released
Enjoy