Optimising Stream streaming traffic

[Freddy Grande]

Hi all,

We have a Proof of Concept running for Stream at a client site and are looking at some guidance regarding optimising the streaming performance.

We are located in Australia, however, as the client's home tenant is set to USA, Stream content is all hosted on US DCs. This causes poor performance from head office and we are hoping to improve it prior to PoC close-out.

We know there is no ExpressRoute support for Stream, nor are there plans for it so we are looking at bypassing all proxies and inspection for streaming traffic through a secondary gateway.

Looking at Row 7 here we can see the Azure Media Services URL *.streaming.mediaservices.windows.net : https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Office-365-URLs-and-IP-address-ranges-8548a211-3fe7-47cb-ab...

The problem is this wildcard will catch ALL Azure Media Services connections and we definitely only want to add bypass rules for the client tenant's Stream traffic.

In my testing from different regions around the world and at different times I've noticed a single URL that videos seem to stream from (place26characterstringhere.streaming.mediaservices.windows.net).

Can we get confirmation that this is a single URL for this tenant's Azure Media Services? Are there any additional ones we can discover or that might appear in the future (load balancing)? Will it ever change?

[#2]

Every Stream tenant will have it's own unique AMS streaming endpoint as you noticed so you can use that URL to route traffic, etc.

In general that URL won't change except if we do something larger.

Right now in our code, there is no way for that URL to change, however eventually in the future we'll likely do some of the following things which *could* cause the URL to maybe change.

• We could add support for "tenant move" which means we could move a tenant from one DC/region to another, which in some cases might result in a new URL.
• We could add support for Azure CDN, which would mean that the URL would be different because it would point to CDN instead of an AMS streaming endpoint.

So it's a safe assumption for now and if it changed in the future it would only change very very rarely.

However... would you mind sharing with us any of your data in terms of poor performance you are seeing from users in Australia connecting and playing from the Stream in US DC? (I'll send you private message).

[#3]

Excellent, thanks for confirming that Marc. 

Curious about your two examples there, understand there may not be solid answers yet though. 

• Tenant Move: If this feature is enabled would it be triggered without an explicit move/request from our end? 
• Azure CDN: As with above, when Azure CDN rolls out, will it be a opt-in change? Or will tenants be migrated to Azure CDN in waves?

I've sent through an email with some more details. 

Thanks again.

[#4]

We aren't actively working on either tenant move or CDN so it's hard to say exactly how we'll implement them if we pick up those projects in the future. I just brought them up as potential things that could change the URLs if we did do them.

If we did either of those features....

Tenant Move could technically be used for both load balancing across DCs in the same region and/or for when a tenant does need to move to a new region for various reasons. So I think it could potentially happen by tenant request or by service maintenance.

For Azure CDN, it depends on if we deem it necessary in the future to have CDN enabled for all videos or just some (say ones that you are making public anonymous). So this one might not have tenant control either on if this is enabled or not.

But as I said above both of these actions would be very rare in occurrence so if we did end up doing either of those features it would only change the URLs very few times ever.