It takes ten years to grow trees, but a hundred to cultivate people. The original intention of education is to educate people, and the original intention of technology is to make science and technology good. Tencent Cloud Serverless works hand in hand with China’s education industry, upholding the original aspiration to empower education with technology, and creating a competitive Serverless solution for China’s education industry.
“With the rapid development of mobile networks and online modes, audio and video communication has become a strong demand in the education and training industry. “51 Talk is dedicated to improving the user experience with technological innovations that quickly enable audio and video interaction in the online education scene.”
– Long Jinyuan, head of audio and video technology at 51Talk
51Talk is a leading brand in China’s online English education industry. It went public on the NYSE in 2016, and was the first Chinese online English education company to go public in the United States. As one of the earliest Online education institutions that practice OMO mode (online-Merge-offline) in China, it supports the whole teaching link on the basis of self-developed supporting software system through the accumulated teaching and research management experience and real scene teaching data accumulated in the industry.
(51Talk Online Classroom Data Flow Chart)
OMO mode refers to a business model that integrates online and offline, uses technology development to open up online and offline, and greatly improves market efficiency. Currently, there are three ways for educational institutions to implement OMO model: self-research, outsourcing services, and purchasing SaaS services. But each of these approaches has its own problems:
**1. High cost: **OMO mode has high technical requirements for AI, big data, cloud computing, Internet of Things and other fields. Self-research capability requires a professional technical team and high cost input;
**2. Difficult to match: ** The outsourcing manufacturer is not familiar with the original architecture, so it is difficult to properly match the requirements realization and development rights;
**3. Low Flexibility: ** Although it seems simple to buy SaaS services, there are problems such as poor flexibility, data islands, and inability to meet customization needs;
01. Take small steps. Don’t let the education industry get stuck in code
The OMO model in the online education industry involves complex processes and new technologies, which put forward higher requirements and challenges to operating costs, technical capabilities and profitability. The key factors that affect the revenue of online education industry are user conversion rate, renewal rate and transfer introduction rate. In essence, the foundation of improving conversion rate is teaching experience and learning outcome. This requires the education industry to quickly test user feedback and constantly verify the market response with minimal cost. 51 Talk based on the understanding of user behavior, the business side needs to quickly iterate new functions: support playback, collection, download and forward students in the classroom wonderful video clips, leaving students on the road of growth and progress of the wonderful moments. Let professional people do professional things, let the education industry just focus on business logic.
Long Jinyuan said: Considering the dual requirements of online efficiency and operating cost, we need solutions that can quickly build services and automatically expand and scale flexibly, so as to speed up the time of project online and reduce the complexity of development, maintenance and expansion.
Serverless enables customers to focus on their own business without having to maintain the underlying infrastructure unrelated to business, shorten the r&d cycle, and truly realize agile development of “small iterations, trial and error fast”. In the Serverless architecture, users operate service-oriented components, such as storage services and authorization services, which shortens the development cycle, reduces the development difficulty, and avoids the delay caused by the infrastructure.
(Let developers focus on business logic)
02. “Panoramic Recording” real-time audio and video TRTC + Cloud function SCF solution
- The cloud function SCF is used to record live content in real time, and the TS file is generated in the specified location.
- After the highlight triggered, read the first few fragments at the trigger point, call the function resource pool, and quickly generate the highlight.
(Flowchart of panorama recording)
- The cloud function SCF can be triggered with one click, and the server can perform the panoramic image recording of the browser.
- Browser multi-channel decoding, one-channel encoding, reduce computing power consumption;
- Browser to achieve multi-channel live stream, signaling, whiteboard and other synchronization integration, simple and intuitive;
- During the recording process, the layout can be adjusted flexibly, and the perspective of anchor and audience can be switched.
- Real-time audio and video TRTC and cloud function SCF internal push and pull flow, greatly improve the real-time, reduce the cost of network traffic;
03. Cost reduction and efficiency increase are the best manifestation of technological progress
Online education technology is not simple to online classes of business system, for example, requires iOS development, software development, PC development, Web development background, etc., even set up the most simple education system, usually need at least 10 people about research and development team, not to mention the late operations, servers, and time cost. At the same time, the online education industry, which sees significant peaks and troughs in user traffic, also faces unexpected surges in traffic. Servers in IDC may not meet computing needs. The hardware procurement cycle for self-built services is long. Therefore, it is urgent to find a feasible solution with the minimum cost.
The Serverless solution supports elastic scaling even if all local traffic is switched to the cloud. The cloud function greatly saves the operation and maintenance costs and the server overhead. The 1-ms per-usage charging mode reduces the cost by 70% (the specific benefits can be estimated based on the service scenarios and use cases).
(Cloud function pay-per-use mode)
Li Yongtao, architect of Tencent Cloud Serverless, has served many well-known education customers in the industry. Based on his rich experience in the field of video cloud for many years, he said, “Serverless, as the paradigm of using the next generation of computing resources, has realized the on-demand use of IT resources in a true sense. Combination of tencent cloud the global Internet data center, in the face of education industry and the regional distribution of delay is sensitive to strong and high range concurrent scene features, provides the corresponding solution – high concurrency scenarios resources quickly, when trough for resource recycling quickly, meet the demand of users at the same time reduce the use of resources costs.”
04. Upgrade of Tencent Cloud Serverless education solution
1. Focus on audio/video and multimedia processing
1V1 class, small class, interactive large class and double teacher class are the four basic scenes of online education, the demand for technology is to meet the high quality of audio and video processing and high concurrency stability.
Serverless audio and video transcoding, push streaming, live streaming and image processing solutions, support flexible and customized transcoding methods, and quickly build customized task processing capabilities of various product combinations such as RTC, RTM, interactive whiteboard, real-time recording, etc., to complement the functional blind spot of the current single cloud service; Adopting distributed architecture, it can withstand the test in the case of massive and high concurrency, and has 99.99% high availability, which can meet the requirements of the thousand class scene.
(Cloud function audio and video transcoding application scenario)
- Efficient integration
Through the cloud function SCF and Faas + Baas services, video uploading, video processing, image processing, storage scenarios, and data processing are organically integrated.
- Long running
Using the long running mechanism of the cloud function, it supports the running time of 12h to 24h, covering the transcoding scenarios of large files that take a long time.
- Smooth migration
Support user-defined configuration of FFmpeg command parameters, and deployment of self-built FFmpeg, flexible transcoding mode.
- The cost is low
All components interact with each other on the Intranet, so there is no additional traffic charge. In a millisecond granularity, the user is charged according to the usage, which has a significant cost advantage.
2. AI interaction and content monitoring and review
The AI interactive classroom, which is developing rapidly in the online education industry, can provide personalized teaching plans and gamified interactive experience according to students’ learning progress, becoming the focus of users, online education institutions and capital.
Tencent Cloud Serverless combines AI and audio and video technology to provide intelligent video layout and processing solutions, including hidden digital watermarking, AI intelligent review of content related to pornography and politics, auxiliary video content analysis and production, real-time personalized recommendation, etc.
(Intelligent recommendation flow chart)
3. Data ETL processing
In the teaching process, the big data generated by students’ portraits, learning situation analysis and classroom quality analysis need to be precipitation and analysis, so as to help students, parents and teachers grasp the teaching effect in a scientific and quantitative way, and timely adjust the classroom content and teaching schedule.
The Tencent Cloud Serverless ETL solution can easily calculate large-capacity data, such as concurrently executing multiple Mapper functions on source data and summarizing the execution results using reducer functions.
(Cloud function data processing application scenario)
The technical advantages of Tencent Cloud Serverless will continue to extend to the whole teaching process of “preparation, teaching, practice, examination, evaluation and management”.
05. Apply for panorama Recording
In the article “Using Serverless Cloud function and Headless Chrome real-time rendering recording merge”, we talk about the recording demand pain points in the online education scene, and introduce a new solution: Headless Chrome panoramic recording solution.
At present, more enterprises have gradually launched it. If you want to participate in the test of this scheme, please click here to complete the private beta form. We will contact you within 1-3 working days.
06. Serverless series solutions for audio and video real-time interaction
- Cloud function and Headless Chrome for real-time rendering recording merge;
- Enter online media streams for TRTC using the Serverless cloud function;
- Using Serverless cloud function to achieve TRTC single-stream/mixed-stream recording;
One More Thing
Experience Tencent Cloud Serverless Demo and receive the New User package 👉 Tencent Cloud Serverless Novice Experience
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