Not enough channel width for broadcasting?

Question

linux

We raised our Nginx server for HLS broadcasts, did according to this instruction , we broadcast with OBS.
Everything works great, the server is in Hetzner Cloud.
During testing, the stream works well, but when we launch it for corporate needs, up to 5 thousand users can access it, it starts to freeze and slow down.
We started to study the problem, the server was powerful enough, we used 8core, 32gb ram, 256gb ssd, there was practically no load at the peak, when the broadcast hung up, the load was on 1 core and then 30-50%
The problem is most likely in the channel width, I could not find what the Hetzner server has a card speed, most likely 1000mb.
We switched to AWS instances, there is the same story, and besides, traffic is paid there, and for 1 terabyte we paid them well ($124), the instance was in Oregon.
Then there were attempts to use methods that were not very attractive for the company, to use a CDN to deliver content, it's expensive, the same CloudFront comes out + the cost of traffic is very expensive, or alternative CDNs for video content delivery were expensive
Now there are thoughts to take a server with a large bandwidth, 100 gigabits, maybe this is also not a solution
Please tell me how to solve the problem?
How to raise your CDN for HLS broadcasts :)
By the way, what have you not tried, will CloudFlare be able to cope with the task? so that he caches everything on his side and does not apply for each fragment of the broadcast to the server directly?

Answer 1

HLS broadcast is a dynamic playlist and static video chunks. It is quite possible to give Chunks through cdn.
If the geocdn is not needed, but only the channel width is needed, then you can simply raise a few more new proxy servers on the hetzner cloud.
Ideally, you would have kubernetus + prometheus (well, or any of their analogues) and raise all these proxy mirrors in them according to the load on the channel. Mirrors are stateless.

Answer 2

As I imagine this nightmare, providing streaming to 5k users at the same time, immediately the wallet becomes sad sad.
Well, if it was 2010. and earlier, then it was really the only option to flood network channels with bubbles, but now we have https://webtorrent.io based on webrtc and p2p, try, of course, the technology is still damp, but you have corporate clients where networks are not such broken ones as mobile ones (everyone for nat and / or p2p traffic is somehow limited) and most importantly, spend this money on finishing it, as a result, everyone will benefit, not just Amazon (supporting such monopolists with money is actually a crime for humanity).