Ziggeo or AWS S3?

[lossoanthony]

Hi Bubble,

I would need your advice. I want to create a platform such as YouTube and I need a large amount of storage and be able to display videos fastly and in good quality to the users. I would like to know if I should better use Ziggeo or connect my plan AWS S3 to bubble ?

Thank you for your reply,
All the best,

Anthony

[wegetdesign]

Hello Anthony,

Good topic. To be honest, for us, it comes down to price. Ziggeo pricing packages are not exactly cheap as you use minutes for recording, uploading, viewing and storage.

If using S3 you are paying for storage and some server usage, but it stills seems far cheaper than Ziggeo.

As a firm we do use Ziggeo, but it tends to be for much smaller, infrequent use cases. If video was to become the major part of one of our applications, we would likely look for an alternative like Video.js plugin and standard file uploading to S3.

Hope that helps,
Omar

[bane]

Hi there Anthony.

My name is Bane, and I am from Ziggeo team. With that being said, I just wanted to point out something very important when it comes to doing this.

My goal here is, as I always like to do, to offer insight that can help you decide with AWS S3 or our system, however only once you know some general aspects of it.

Benefits of S3:
You implement how the storage is handled on your side allowing you full control of the same.
This means you:

1. Control the backups (intervals, level of backup, etc)
2. Control the storage (encrypted storage vs non encrypted, etc)
3. You can fine tune how videos are organized on your S3

You can also include additional S3 buckets to grow in different regions, etc. depending on your own preference.

Benefits of Ziggeo:
Ziggeo controls how the storage is implemented and handled for you, allowing you some control through settings.
This means you:

1. Do not need to worry about backup and restore as Ziggeo handles that on multiple levels for you
2. All our storage is encrypted on rest yet instantly decrypted for playback, offering speed and best protection of your data
3. We handle the organization of files, offering you tokens to keep as reference in your own system.

While you can not include additional S3 options in Ziggeo you can push your videos to any of the push services (integrations) we support through API or a click of the button.

Now these are just few points. I had been in touch with several customers on our side that were thinking the same. I remember one that had spend 2+ months with their team working on their own storage. After the invested time, they decided to drop it and have switched back to our storage for multiple reasons. These reasons might not be important for you so you can still have S3 as an option that would work better for you.

Things they considered:

1. Ziggeo has a video and that video has streams.

• (Go to your application > Videos > click on a video and under the preview you will see the option (link) to view single streams. When you go there you can see even 5 videos (depends on your video profiles and effect profiles). Ziggeo charges only 1 (original) stream, while all other streams are there for free. In your own storage, if you wanted to have those 5 streams in your own storage, you would pay 5x the storage (since there are 5 videos)

2. Ziggeo hosted videos work with other features such as auth tokens (a way to secure actions on videos), while videos from S3 would not have such options available (you would need to create this architecture on your own).
3. Ziggeo player and servers have code that handles the rewrite (redo/re-recording) of videos so your single token is still right even if this happens. Your own system implementation would require you to know which video to delete and new one to use in its place on re-recordings, cache purging and handling, etc.

Hope this helps In our eyes we will be happy to help with any questions on either implementation, as we did so far with customers that were thinking or going for S3 approach. I did however see people spend too much time on implementation just to notice that it is not an option they can utilize fully.

Suggestion for going with S3 would be to make a fine adjustment in what stream you wish to be sent to your S3 buckets. If you know that you will always use 640*480 (just example) resolution, then keep that one. By keeping a single stream, your cost will be lower on S3. If you push all of them, costs will top Ziggeo’s storage cost quickly. Also push one of our streams, not originals (very important for self-storage).

PS: depending on plan on Ziggeo your storage price changes. Lets again take a look at an example video of 640x480 (SD). The highest cost of storage is on Starter plan which is $0.0014 of a minute per month. This means you have to have over 700 minutes (almost 12 hours) of video in a month for $1 USD. On AWS you are charged by size, not by the minutes. I can send you same video, one can take 500MB and the other 2MB of equal time length This is why I mentioned it is important to use one of our created streams, and not the original one.

Now I tried to be as general in the above as possible. For the video website, like Youtube is, you will need to think about few more different things like architecture, security, speed, load, etc. of your storage implementation.

I wrote about that in Quora in some length however can not find where at this point. Gist of it would be that if you have a team of people, that knows how to work with storage and other points that will come up connected to it, some of which I mentioned above, you can go with self-managed solution. If you are one person team, or there are few of you then it is best to grab that helping hand and use a (auto)managed solution instead

Hope this helps you make the choice that is best for you.

Regards,
Bane

[david17]

What have you used to integrate the upload and manage S3 buckets? Just AWS’ infrastructure? Any resources on their posting APIs?