Viddler

Viddler is thrilled to welcome Ask Dr. Heather to our Business Community. I sat down recently and talked with Dr. Heather about the creation of Ask Dr. Heather and her use of online video.

What inspired you to create Ask Dr. Heather?

As a veterinarian, one of my biggest frustrations is communication with pet owners. Most pets only visit the veterinarian once or twice a year for fifteen to twenty minutes. I struggle during that time to educate them about all of the things their pet needs – and there are often a lot of important things to talk about. When pets do get sick, many pet owners look elsewhere for information and many times get bad information which may lead to a delay in treatment.

I also struggle with a seeming lack of trust in the information I present. People don’t want to vaccinate or run tests, etc. because they believe they aren’t necessary or they believe that their veterinarian is just trying to sell them something or make money. The truth is, we are there to help you take care of your pet. We want to HELP. We want your pet to be happier and healthier. What better way to build trust than for clients to get to know their veterinarians as people…because that’s who we believe the most…people we know the best. The internet provides a forum for us to explain what we are trying to do and why we are trying to do it in a place that people can go back to again and again…as many times as they need to…and then ask a question about it, or post a comment that someone else can add to.

You have been able to create incredible content without stressing a very high production level. What would you recommend to businesses that are not yet using video and are apprehensive because they do not feel they have the resources and/or ability to create good content?

I would say that creating good content is as much about being passionate about what you are doing and doing it passionately as it is about the resources that you have to do whatever your thing is. AskDrHeather so far has been built using a laptop, Flip cam, and digital voice recorder. I don’t see that changing in the near future. If we can do it, anyone can. If you can use a digital camera (we got Flip camera for around $200) and a video editing program (available for less than $100), then you can create great videos. We are not videographers here, we don’t have any special training or equipment, we are just people who love animals, love being veterinary professionals, and truly want every pet owner and animal lover out there to understand that we want the same thing they want…happy, healthy pets! Like they say at Nike…Just Do It.

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Viddler’s core architecture is in the middle of an enormous overhaul that will provide reliability to 50+ internal and external services as well as moving to a world-class datacenter, Internap. This multi-month project will dramatically increase our uptime ensuring your videos get delivered when your viewers need them. I sat down with our Systems Architect, Todd Troxell, to talk about the upgrade.

What is the main goal Viddler is looking to accomplish by making this upgrade?

Our customers have spoken and they want greater uptime and service reliability. This is the theme of 2011 and the goal of this project.

Why did Viddler choose Internap?

We chose Internap for their superior network architecture and network engineering staff. We were burned in the past with mis-managed route failovers and slow unreliable links. This is a move to a very well respected name in Internet transit in a world-class faciity. This means faster uploads, greater scalability, and outrageously greater service uptime.

What new hardware has Viddler installed?

Here is a diagram.

In most cases we are doubling our hardware specs or greater in terms of raw CPU, memory, and IO. It’s a factor the market since newer hardware for the same price == faster, however this may have a noticable affect on site performance. We don’t have an accurate test platform to know for sure until it is operational.

In terms of *new* hardware, we have 6x the database capacity, redundant secondary databases, more complete staging setup, redundant networking gear, redundant links to the internet, redundant power in all servers, redundant logging servers, redundant monitoring and adminstration servers, redundant sending of email, thumbnail generation, video recording, transcoding- in total adding redundancy to 50+ components. All of this is new in Viddler NYC.

Viddler has been making great strides over the years to build out their back end hardware and increase site reliability. How will these upgrades affect reliability?

Our upgrades will ensure higher uptime of our entire platform from the core application to our video delivery mechanism and 50+ ancillary services. This is a many-month effort to build enterprise reliability into our once fledgling platform. They will also allow us to iterate on our platform and build out future offerings with far lower friction.

How will it affect speed?

All of the hardware is faster and some of it is of higher quality (Cisco switches for instance). We’re not investing in speed really here, but it may be a by-product.

What does this installation overall mean in terms of how it effects Viddler’s ability to grow in the future?

This architecture is fully modular and repeatable and can be replicated in micro-clusters around the world. There is even a possiblity that it could be pushed onto appliances for users who would prefer to run Viddler in a closed environment. In this new architecture, we will be able to add capacity very easily meaning we can scale our video delivery to a very high number of users. Being repeatable, it will also allow us to replicate and test load and stage new versions with far greater confidence and reliability. This change is not only about reliability but a core fix to our engineering culture, adding repeatability and modularity and paving the way for architectural iteration and experimentation.

Bryan and I getting ready to do some heavy lifting. Todd plotting his attack!

Last week our President Rob Sandie and fellow team member Darryl Rentz headed to NYC to attend Streaming Media East 2011.  Rob had the opportunity to sit down with Beet.TV to discuss Viddler’s storied history, present, and bright future including value added services such as Contest Manager and Subscriptions.

Watch the full interview below and read the full article at Beet.TV that also discusses Viddler’s partnership with Gawker Media.

Recently our very own Systems Architect, Todd Troxell, took a little time out of his busy schedule to sit down with High Scalability and share the details on Viddler’s architecture.  High Scalability describes Viddler’s architecture as, “It’s an interesting mix of different technologies, groups, and processes, but it somehow seems to all work.”

Check out the post on High Scalability’s blog to read the full interview and learn more about Viddler’s platform architecture.

The Stats

1. About 7 million embed views per day.
2. About 3000 videos uploaded per day.
3. 1500 req/sec at peak.
4. ~130 people pressing the play button at peak.
5. 1PB of video served in February
6. 80T of storage
7. 45,160 hours of CPU time spent on video encoding in last 30 days
8. Usage is relatively flat throughout the day, with only a ~33% difference between valley and peak which suggests they get a lot of usage globally. graphic.

We’ve mentioned Rails for Zombies from our blog before but now we’re privileged to be able to bring you an interview with Gregg Pollack from EnvyLabs (and the guy in the instructional videos) to tell us about how Viddler has helped Rails For Zombies‘ success as well as about EnvyLabs’ new venture; Code School.

Gregg, we at Viddler think Rails for Zombies is a fantastic resource for developers moving to Rails. How successful has Rails for Zombies been from your point of view?

Over 5,600 people have completed the entire Rails for Zombies course, over 25,000 people have signed up, and over a quarter of a million people visited the website.  We have been blown away by the response to the website, and it feels great to know that we’re giving lots of developers their first taste of Rails.

What inspired EnvyLabs to couple the video content with the programming tutorials?

1. We had first hand experience doing conference tutorials where people had to show up with applications installed. No matter how simple the configuration was to get a library / application installed, people are going to have problems. Inevitably you’ll end up doing a lot of troubleshooting, trying to get crap installed on someone’s computer. We wanted to have the same sort of interactive tutorials, but do away with the configuration issues by allowing users to code in the browser.

2. We realized that learning by reading a book or watching a screencast isn’t as powerful as learning by doing. You actually learn something if you’re forced to solve problems.

Rails for Zombies is very well produced. What made EnvyLabs put so much of an investment out there, and then offer it all for free?

Thanks! It helps that we have a killer video delivery service like Viddler built into it. *warm fuzzies*

About 10 months ago we put out the Rails 3 Screencasts (also powered by Viddler) and I quickly realized that the videos (although they were basic) were targeted towards existing Rails developers. I took a look around and realized there needed to be more (up-to-date) introductory Rails content, so it made sense that the next project needed to be a beginner website.

Regarding the free part: Some people like writing open source software, I like giving back by creating educational content. When you put out content for free it has the opportunity to benefit so many more people. If we were charging for zombies we’d have maybe 10% of the user base we do today.

Rails for Zombies uses some key Viddler features, such as controlling the video player with JavaScript. How have these features helped with the success of Rails for Zombies?

Viddler is the perfect platform to host our videos, allowing for HD streaming and downloading of content. Having the ability to control the player with javascript makes it dirt simple for users to skip around to watch a certain topic again if they didn’t understand it the first time. That’s one of the awesome things about video education. If you don’t get something the teacher says the first time, you can easily skip back to the beginning of the topic and watch it again.

We at Viddler would like to thank you for putting this resource together. Being a Rails shop ourselves we’ve all referenced the labs to up our Rails game. Thanks Gregg.

That’s great to hear, and I’m happy to say that we’re on the cusp of releasing a new course which follows the same Rails for Zombies format. The course is called “Rails Best Practices”, and it’s targeted towards the Intermediate Rails developer who wants to polish his/her skills. So, if you dig Rails for Zombies and you’ve created at least one Rails app on your own, you’ll really dig Rails Best Practices. Rails best practices sports a brand new interface, point system, hint system, and an all new set of screencasts and in browser challenges.

It’ll be running on a new system called Code School, which will act as a store front (like the app store) for purchasing educational content. We also plan on also releasing a jQuery and HTML5/CSS3 course over the next month or two.

The courses are not going to be free, but they’ll definitely be a lot of fun.

When they’re up, you’ll find them over at CodeSchool.com. If they’re not up yet, you’ll find a form to be notified when they gets released.

Thanks to Gregg and the entire EnvyLabs team for making Viddler their preferred video service for both Rails for Zombies and Code School. We at Viddler wish them the best in their new venture!