Sardius
Video Delivery Platform Races Cloud Storage Providers; Backblaze B2 Outperforms
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Sardius
Jason Shore
Co-Founder and CEO, Sardius Media
Stored
Egress
Fastest Globally
At Sardius Media, a live video broadcasting, events, and on demand media delivery platform, being cloud agnostic is baked into the company’s DNA. They replicate storage across multiple cloud providers around the globe and use a custom-coded race mechanism to identify the fastest provider whenever a given piece of content is called by an end user.
Backblaze is one of the many S3-compatible cloud storage providers Sardius includes in the race mix, along with their clients’ on-premises storage solutions. Delivered files are cached at the edge, and all media files are stored across multiple storage providers for the duration of their lifetime. This not only gives Sardius the fastest user experience, it also eliminates single points of failure.
Of all the cloud storage providers included in Sardius’ race mechanism, Backblaze wins the race a majority of the time in the U.S. and up to 80% of the time globally, depending on location. And with 3x free egress and broad compatibility, Backblaze helps Sardius achieve durability and affordability at scale.
Sardius Media partners closely with mission-driven broadcasters to deliver live and on demand video content. By becoming an extension of their clients’ teams, Sardius custom-designs fully optimized end-to-end broadcasting workflows.
Sardius Media is 100% serverless; the company relies on microservices, Cloudflare Workers, and AWS Lambda functions to run a network of event triggers. Each event—a file upload, for example—automatically triggers the next step in the workflow. That’s how on demand video assets are uploaded to the Sardius platform and distributed to various cloud storage providers, including Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. For live broadcasts, Sardius clients use AWS Elementals, HTTP live streaming (HLS), real-time messaging protocol (RTMP), and secure reliable transport (SRT) encoders to deliver their HLS files to the Sardius platform. They then move through a single HLS entry point, which distributes the files to all the relevant storage locations. Whenever an end user attempts to access video files, Sardius uses a custom-coded race mechanism to identify the fastest provider for that client and location.
Sardius Media supports mission-driven organizations like nonprofits and houses of worship with two main products: live event management and video distribution. On the live events side, they provide end-to-end support for everything from registration to video delivery. With their distribution platform, Sardius streamlines live video and video on demand (VOD) workflows. While live events were their main focus for years, Sardius saw 300% growth in their video distribution platform in 2023.
Sardius offers clients hands-on, white-glove service. They monitor every video stream, optimize each broadcast, and manage events with round-the-clock Slack support. To that end, many of their implementations are custom-built to integrate with the client’s tech ecosystem, from CRM and authentication tools to file upload and translation procedures.
We become part of the client’s team so they can go home and spend time with their families instead of dealing with the complexities of running an online broadcast.
Jason Shore, Co-Founder and CEO, Sardius Media
When Sardius was founded in 2014, there were only a few storage providers on the market. Many of them were newer companies, so CEO Jason Shore wasn’t sure which to trust. To avoid being locked into a single vendor, they decided to replicate file storage across multiple providers. In short, Sardius was multi-cloud and cloud agnostic before those terms were buzz-worthy.
Providing the fastest user experience is non-negotiable in the VOD industry—end users want and need content delivered immediately. Distributing data around the globe and prioritizing proximity to end users is a critical aspect of Sardius’ business allowing them to deliver the speed and quality that users demand.
Not only that, replicating data across providers gives Sardius the redundancy and durability they need to protect everyday operations and satisfy long-term backup requirements at the same time; files are also archived for their entire lifetime with multiple storage providers, further mitigating risk.
Today, Sardius automatically stores every video file uploaded to its platform across multiple cloud providers, including Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.
Every provider has a bad day. We wanted to spread out availability, increase durability, and still pay a very reasonable price.
Jason Shore, Co-Founder and CEO, Sardius Media
The crown jewel of Sardius’ tech environment is a proprietary, custom-coded race worker. Each time a video file is requested as the edge, Sardius sends that request to all its storage providers, triggering a race to see who can deliver the video fastest.
Sardius races three or four storage providers for each client. In addition to S3-compatible cloud providers with free egress, some clients add their own on-premises storage solutions to the race mix. Any providers that don’t perform (or lead to inflated costs) are removed promptly.
Upon delivery, Sardius uses tiered caching to keep video files available at the edge and limit new requests, which helps keep costs low. Sardius also uses a network of edge workers that transport and copy files to maintain the ideal level of redundancy, for example if a requested file is not stored in a given location.
We built this race mechanism at the very beginning. It lets us see which provider is the fastest and the most performant in a given region.
Jason Shore, Co-Founder and CEO, Sardius Media
“The best answer wins” is one of Sardius Media’s core values. In that vein, the concept of the race mechanism has become a company philosophy. They also race transcoding providers to see which performs best.
Although clients are aware of the storage redundancy and race mechanisms at play, they access everything through a single URL generated by the platform. Sardius tracks each client’s unique storage within their system so they can bill for a single storage location instead of a portion of every provider.
After comparing many providers across the globe, Sardius has been particularly impressed with Backblaze’s performance. Backblaze B2 wins the race a majority of the time in the U.S., and up to 80% of the time globally, depending on location.
What excites Sardius the most is the way Backblaze combines affordability and performance into a single solution. “It’s a surprise because you don’t always see the best performance at the best prices,” Shore says. “Backblaze does both.”
One of the keys to that success is broad compatibility; in addition to S3 compatibility, Backblaze B2 is compatible with various transcoders, compute providers, etc., which supports Sardius’ race worker approach. Backblaze’s free bandwidth with content delivery networks (CDNs) like Cloudflare and 3x free egress are also a priority for Sardius, because egressing video out of the cloud for millions of viewers worldwide adds up quickly. “That’s the beauty of Backblaze. It’s just so simple.”
