WOT Kingsoft Cloud Hao Mingfei: The evolution of Kingsoft Cloud's live broadcast and on-demand basic services

【51CTO.com original article】Just last week, the WOTA Global Architecture and Operation Technology Summit hosted by 51CTO was grandly held at the Beijing Renaissance Hotel. This WOTA set up 15 cutting-edge hot technology forums, and 60+ technical experts from first-tier Internet companies at home and abroad such as Google, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Kingsoft brought more than 50 practical architecture experiences and successful experience sharing cases, and worked together to create a two-day industry-leading technology event.

At the D venue of the high-performance live broadcast system architecture on the afternoon of the ***th, Hao Mingfei, the video technology director of Kingsoft Cloud, delivered a speech titled "The Evolution of Kingsoft Cloud's Live Broadcast and On-Demand Basic Services". After the speech, the reporter interviewed Hao Mingfei and asked him to share the evolution of Kingsoft Cloud's IT architecture, peripheral services, and algorithms after the first year of live broadcast, as well as what changes Kingsoft Cloud has undergone in this evolution process and what experience it has accumulated.

The polarized live video industry

From the popularity of live video in 2016 to the more rational guidance given by policies in the first quarter of 2017, Hao Mingfei believes that the polarization of IT technology demand in the live video industry is becoming more and more obvious. On the one hand, small and medium-sized customers or start-up customers in the video industry hope that IT services can help them quickly trial and error, and hope that Kingsoft Cloud will not only provide IaaS services, but also hope that Kingsoft Cloud will package the services into SaaS, so that they can use high-quality content to make a complete and rapid trial and error at the lowest cost and shortest development cycle. On the other hand, large customers in the video industry have higher and higher quality requirements, requiring to ensure the high availability and high openness of IT systems.

Hao Mingfei told reporters that many start-ups may not have mature professional IT teams, and this is exactly the business opportunity brought by the polarization mentioned by Kingsoft Cloud. For such customers, Kingsoft Cloud provides SaaS services, allowing such corporate customers to focus more on their business without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure and terminal adaptation. "They only need to control their core content, and the rest of the work can be left to Kingsoft Cloud."

Of course, if customers want to control the distribution and playback links themselves, Kingsoft Cloud also supports this. Kingsoft Cloud's big data can provide service quality and visualization of the status of each node, supporting customers' independent scheduling.

Safety by standing on the shoulders of giants

High security has always been a major advantage of Kingsoft Cloud. Hao Mingfei revealed that before Kingsoft Cloud started to provide live CDN, the entire company had already positioned itself as an open cloud service, similar to Amazon's storage-type services. "Kingsoft Cloud currently has a set of fully commercial cloud services, including data storage, data transmission and other services. For example, in order to meet policy requirements, video content must be kept for a certain period of time as required. Customers can easily adjust various application settings on Kingsoft Cloud's cloud storage, such as encryption, authorization, etc., which are fully in line with Amazon's S3 service standards.

From a technical perspective, Kingsoft Cloud divides video transmission into two types: one is the transmission of API interfaces, for which Kingsoft Cloud can provide encryption services; the other is the transmission of video content, for which Kingsoft Cloud can provide a set of standard services and also support customized services for users to ensure the security of the transmission link. Hao Mingfei gave an example, saying that Apple required all video content transmission to be carried out using https in 2016, and Kingsoft Cloud also supported this. "All of this is based on the fact that Kingsoft Cloud was previously positioned as a commercial cloud service. In fact, we are standing on the shoulders of giants," he said modestly.

Hao Mingfei also introduced that Kingsoft Cloud was initially positioned not only as an acceleration channel, but also to provide full-link services for live video broadcasting. For example, Kingsoft Cloud has both SDKs for the launch end and SDKs for the playback end, so that users can quickly run through the entire link even if they are not related to this channel. In terms of algorithms, Kingsoft Cloud has optimized the h265 encoding level, and hopes that there will be a lot of room for improvement in the future when CDN competition becomes homogeneous, using technology as a driving force.

2017: Entering into games, event live broadcasting and other emerging fields

Although the country has made some clear requirements for the playback of video content this year, such as video watermarking and video monitoring, in Hao Mingfei's view, these are reasonable regulatory requirements, and the technical implementation is not complicated. Kingsoft Cloud's services for video customers are more far-reaching. For example, when customers have video monitoring needs, Kingsoft Cloud provides storage services for customers, which are randomly available for customer review and meet the needs of regulatory authorities. When the live broadcast of an event needs to be postponed, in order to facilitate internal review during the postponement process, Kingsoft Cloud also provides product-based supporting services, such as how to ban at the right time during the review process, how to cut off the live broadcast, how to resume the live broadcast, and how to meet regulatory policies, all of which can provide service support. Not only that, Kingsoft Cloud can also perform pornography identification and anti-terrorism technical analysis on live broadcast streams to help customers reduce the cost of manual review and improve work efficiency.

At the end of the interview, Hao Mingfei said that in 2016, Kingsoft Cloud mainly focused on the vertical industry of mobile live broadcasting and had already occupied half of the market. In 2017, Kingsoft Cloud will continue to make efforts in short videos, games, event live broadcasting and other emerging fields.

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]