At the beginning of 2018, the Internet circle has been swept up with a wave of “big guy crazy coin, netizens like to answer questions”. The live question-and-answer platforms represented by Yingke Cheese Superman, through the interactive mode of answering questions and distributing prizes, quickly exploded the Internet hot spots. Later, several live and video platforms also launched live quiz games. For a while, this interactive mode of low participation threshold, high bonus pool and flow fission spread has become a new important means of attracting customers, promoting activity and making profits, which is obviously more effective than spending money to promote.
With this model, live q&A apps began to occupy the front row position in the APP STORE, and received advertising sponsorship from giants one after another, and successfully realized traffic. There is no doubt that live q&A has become a new trend!
What’s holding developers back
In the live question-and-answer mode, users log in the live broadcast room within a specified time and answer online questions under the guidance of the host. If they answer 12 questions correctly, they can win the top prize. The rules seem simple, but the technology behind them is not easy to implement.
From the perspective of the system, mobile live Q&A has the following four typical characteristics:
First, the interaction time of live broadcast is short, the time of a live broadcast is about 30 minutes. Second, millions of concurrent users are very common in a single live broadcast room. Third, high-frequency live broadcast is about 6 times a day
These characteristics determine that the whole live answering system has high requirements for stability, performance and safety. If it wants to be realized, it needs to face the following scenarios and problems:
First, high requirements for high concurrency, real time and stability
Livestream trivia games can have hundreds of thousands or millions of participants in a single session, and the pressure of massive concurrency is enormous. In addition, the form of live question-and-answer is highly interactive, with the host, the answering screen and cutscenes appearing alternately. Once the screen is stuck, the whole answering process will be destroyed. So for the system of high concurrency, real-time and stability requirements are very high.
Secondly, the whole network push topic synchronization
The synchronization of questions on the server is the core of the live answering system. There are millions of online mobile phone clients and the same set of question bank. The server needs to push questions at the right time point to deliver the second-level content, and make accurate judgment and statistics on the answer results within the second-level time. In this process, multiple push channels are needed to ensure the success rate of push questions reaching the client.
Third, the flow center frequency is wool party
As the center of traffic storm, it also faces great security risks. For example, business vulnerabilities caused by data leaks, front-end services unavailable due to DDos attacks, economic losses and server pressure caused by cheating plug-ins, and so on. Once the system suffers security risks, it will not only bring economic losses, but also lead to the loss of core users.
Finally, additional features are difficult to develop
In order to improve the interactivity and interest of users in answering questions, enliven the atmosphere of live q&A and increase the means of operation and cash, most live broadcast rooms not only have the functions of live beauty and bullet screen comment, but also support the integration of multiple gameplay such as interactivity with the mic, clip interlude and dynamic subtitle. The development of each function alone takes a long time, and it is very difficult to quickly launch a set of functions.
In the face of various technical problems, enterprises will inevitably choose third-party solutions to quickly launch products, which can not only avoid the high difficulty and long cycle of self-development, but also save labor and resource costs, and successfully take off with tuyere.
Ali Cloud technology escort platform just rest assured “coin”
In order to help enterprises grasp the wind, Ali Cloud launched a one-stop mobile live question-and-answer solution. With stable and high performance computing infrastructure and extensible live q&a system architecture, the great questions of synchronous implementation technology level, stable smooth push-pull flow, low latency interaction, traffic safety, such as core competence, and provides the user operations, product optimization and realized business services, satisfy the enterprise the application requirement of high performance, high stability, one-stop.
Double – line push – stream link ensures frame rate stability
The core appeal of live Q&A push stream link is the stability of the push stream link, which ensures the stable frame rate of the push stream during the 30-minute push stream answer process. The system architecture of Aliyun live Q&A push stream is as follows:
- Push stream service is deployed in Ali Cloud Beijing cloud room, SNAT push stream to Ali Cloud live center, through Alibaba ABTN special line network, push stream link stability is guaranteed.
- Two sets of domain names are respectively used for Beijing unit and Shanghai unit of the live broadcast center. If a unit of the live broadcast center fails, it can be switched in real time.
- A set of domain names, a room activity push two streams, mutual Backup.
- The live center does real-time transcoding.
- Ali Cloud live video service real-time second level monitoring of push and pull flow, effectively monitor the stability of push stream frame rate and the smoothness of pull stream playback, and synchronize the real-time second level monitoring alarm information through the enterprise service spike group.
The above live streaming question and answer system will deploy the streaming service on Ali Cloud, combine alibaba ABTN dedicated line network with Ali Cloud video streaming service in Beijing live unit and Shanghai live unit to provide double dedicated line streaming link, which can guarantee the stability of streaming frame rate and 99.99% SLA of streaming service availability.
Quick judgment of “draw topic synchronization” determines the user experience
Ali Cloud related product manager said that another core requirement of live q&A is “picture synchronization”, which is also the key to determine user experience. Aliyun provides the following solutions:
- When the moderator asks a question, prepare to push the topic. In order to quickly let users see the questions, the question bank is stored in the aliyun persistent cache database Redis.
- Through AppServer of the access party, the field personnel send a message and call OpenAPI of Aliyun to insert several SEI frames into the current position of the live streaming video stream. The frame contents can be customized by the business.
- After the playback SDK receives the video stream, the SEI frame is parsed out and called back to the APP. At this point, the APP immediately requests the question information from the AppServer, and then displays it on the APP to complete the whole question setting process.
- After receiving user answers, user answer results will be written into Redis in real time to judge whether the answers are correct and returned to the field personnel. Complete the process.
The above schemes are interlinked to realize the simultaneous transmission of the host signal and audio and video through the same transmission channel, which can achieve high precision synchronization.
Traffic centric security cannot be ignored
The live q&A became the center of traffic as soon as it went live, followed by a series of problems such as black industry and security breaches. In this regard, Ali Cloud through security components, white box signature technology, cloud prevention and control technology, effectively ensure the security of business logic, prevent algorithm leakage and business vulnerability exposure, at the same time protect the communication link security in the process of answering questions, prevent offline plug-in automatic answering, share the prize. And provide cloud protection, man-machine confrontation, identification of black production, prevent simulator, device information tampering and a large number of garbage registration.
In addition, the solution can be paired with DDoS protection package security products. The defense capabilities can be directly loaded onto cloud products. After simple deployment, the system can take effect in minutes and quickly upgrade product security capabilities.
In addition, if there is a machine external instantaneous into super-charging the business situation, the solution can match Web application firewall, using intelligent gate valve mechanism, filtering malicious plug-ins machine request, accurate current limiting technology guarantee smooth business visit, reduce the pressure of the back-end service, easy to deal with business peak traffic dozens of times, one hundred times.
Rich one-stop live video service
Aliyun live video q&A solution relies on the powerful cloud computing infrastructure and the leading CDN content distribution network. In the function layer, it can realize the standard configuration capabilities of anchors such as face beauty, and can also complete the free switch between live broadcast pictures and other content through the directing technology.
A typical scenario application: when the host opens, dynamic subtitles are used to introduce the activity rules more intuitively, and promotional flowers are inserted to guide users to carry out the activity publicity. Moreover, video gaskets can be added before, during and after the activity, which can be used for advertisement implantation and preparation processing in case of abnormal live broadcasting.
It is reported that the video live broadcast service has basically covered all industries, serving more than 4,000 customers.
In the view of many livestreaming platforms, livestreaming quiz games can be popular among tens of millions of netizens without the empowerment and support of cloud computing technology behind them. Inke Cheese Superman even directly stated, “Inke Cheese Superman is supported by Ariyun stably!” I believe that in the emerging field of live q&A, with the escort of Ali Cloud, there will be more enterprises flying by cloud!
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