TranscodeFlow
A distributed video transcoder: an event-driven AWS pipeline that produces adaptive bitrate HLS streams.
The problem
Transcoding one video into several quality levels is slow on a single machine, and idle workers cost money.
Technical approach
A video upload to S3 queues a job on SQS. On-demand ECS Fargate workers transcode it into 1080p, 720p and 360p HLS outputs, and compute scales to zero when the queue is empty.
Architecture and decisions
- Infrastructure written as modular Terraform: VPC, S3, SQS with dead-letter queues, ECR, ECS, Cognito and CloudFront.
- An API that tracks job status, plus authenticated webhooks.
This case study is still being written. Architecture, trade-offs and lessons will be added as they're documented.