This week, I primarily worked on deploying both the video server and load balancer on Amazon ec2 instances using AWS’s CodeDeploy module. The process was quite different from how I had previously deployed code on virtual machines, involving setting up configuration files and scripts in order to deploy code across multiple servers. However, after gaining some familiarity with the module with the first code deployment, I will now be able to use it to mass deploy code across multiple instances which will be helpful further on in the project as we update our implementation and also scale up operations to accommodate more load.
I also created an AWS S3 bucket to fetch our video files from which is already being used in our current implementation of the video server. Using the S3 bucket does currently remove scrubbing and returning the video in chunks from our application which could be a potential problem when load balancing incoming requests. Therefore, I am currently working on returning this functionality to the video servers while using S3.
This coming week, I will be working on obtaining the metrics that will be used for our custom load balancing algorithm: mainly CPU utilization and response time so we can also set up the monitor node. I may try to use Amazon’s own load balancers to gain insight into how these metrics can be obtained.