Nimble Streamer Live Transcoder is currently used in various live transcoding scenarios on various platforms. It can be deployed both to bare metal and virtual servers.
When it comes to HEVC (H.265) transcoding, there are certain limitations you may face. H.265 encoding is resource consuming so Nimble Live Transcoder supports only hardware encoding which is currently implemented for NVidia NVENC and Intel QuickSync. So if your project requires to use some cloud computing platform with no bare metal, you need to find a provider which has hardware acceleration available as part of cloud services. Our customers ask us about such provider so we wanted to do some analysis about this this.
After some research we ended up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Here's what we have.
First, we need to define what chips are capable of HEVC encoding. Take a look at NVENC Support Matrix to see which of the chips have proper support. Considering latest NVidia changes in GeForce drivers EULA, not many cards can do what we need.
Having the list of proper chipsets, check EC2 instance types. There are two of them that meet our criteria.
We ran some tests on g3.4xlarge instance type, it has Tesla M60 chipset on board which we tested previously on bare metal. This time it also showed great results being used in cloud environment.
Notice that not all regions have P3 and G3 instances available. We tested our case in US East N. Virginia region, you should manually check what is the closest region with required instance types.
When it comes to HEVC (H.265) transcoding, there are certain limitations you may face. H.265 encoding is resource consuming so Nimble Live Transcoder supports only hardware encoding which is currently implemented for NVidia NVENC and Intel QuickSync. So if your project requires to use some cloud computing platform with no bare metal, you need to find a provider which has hardware acceleration available as part of cloud services. Our customers ask us about such provider so we wanted to do some analysis about this this.
Choosing EC2
After some research we ended up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Here's what we have.
First, we need to define what chips are capable of HEVC encoding. Take a look at NVENC Support Matrix to see which of the chips have proper support. Considering latest NVidia changes in GeForce drivers EULA, not many cards can do what we need.
Having the list of proper chipsets, check EC2 instance types. There are two of them that meet our criteria.
- G3 instances have Tesla M60 based on 2nd generation of Maxwell chip family, starting from 1.14 USD per hour.
- P3 instances have Tesla V100 based on Volta chip family, starting from 3.06 USD per hour.
We ran some tests on g3.4xlarge instance type, it has Tesla M60 chipset on board which we tested previously on bare metal. This time it also showed great results being used in cloud environment.
Notice that not all regions have P3 and G3 instances available. We tested our case in US East N. Virginia region, you should manually check what is the closest region with required instance types.
