Amazon.com, Inc.
Automated detection of capacity for video streaming origin server

Abstract:

A system for testing the streaming capacity of a media streaming system, or of one or more origin servers thereof, includes a control system that controls the provisioning of computing resources, such as virtual machine instances, configured as load generators. The load generators establish a plurality of concurrent streams of content from the media streaming system, thus representing a plurality of connected user devices. The streams impart a load on the media streaming system; additional load generators can be added to a scalable group to increase the load. The load generators can produce monitoring data describing errors in network activity (e.g., dropped packets) and in the stream data itself (e.g., synchronization errors). A metric analysis system calculates performance metrics based on the monitoring data, and signals the control system to add or remove load generators until the load is as high as possible without degrading service, revealing the streaming capacity.