whatsupcams

Panoramic camera streaming service

What'supcams

What'sUpCams?

What’sUpCams is a panoramic camera streaming service enabling people to follow their most loved destinations. The service provides more then 400 cameras and streams. Stream hosts have the possibility to advertise their location by advertising or sponsoring streams.

Along with the their page https://www.whatsupcams.com they offer the possibility to embed videos on 3rd party pages. They have many such integrations. Along with the core product they also offer other streaming services and photobooths on iconic locations around Slovenia.

The task at hand

The original team decided to part their ways, the owner though wanted to continue the development of the product.

The platform was in bad shape. Unfinished, no source version control, deployed on unmanaged hardware, no concept of fault tolerance, unmaintained. Systems running were out of date and using short term support releases. The website was often crashing due to increasing traffic.

Solution

The first phase of the solution consisted mostly of DevOps work. Setting up a cluster on the OVH Public Cloud, setting up git and CI. Migrating as much services as possible to the new cluster and the cloud.

During the first phase we noticed the platform is poorly coping with traffic, the snapshots are not updated regularly. Streams become unavailable. Which brought us to the second phase.

The second phase was to, well, re-engineer the whole platform. With newer technologies and concepts, speeding up APIs, caching, replacing in house developed components with cloud services, removing maintenance costs.

Technologies