Stateless Conferencing Architecture with Shared Store
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current collaboration systems face delays and loss of virtual meeting state when a collaboration server becomes unavailable, leading to a poor user experience due to the need for re-authentication and inability to recreate the previous meeting environment, and redundant servers increase costs.
Innovation Solution
A conference system architecture comprising stateless conference servers and a shared conference store maintains conference state information, allowing seamless reconnection and minimal disruption during server failures, with load balancers and MCU factories managing workloads and redundancy.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a collaboration server locally maintains all conference information, then the server can provide complete conferencing services, but the system reliability deteriorates when the server becomes unavailable
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments conference information into two parts: static conference information (stored on the shared conference store) and dynamic conference state information (stored locally on the collaboration server). This segmentation allows the static information to persist across server failures while the dynamic state can be quickly restored, resolving the contradiction between maintaining complete service capability and ensuring availability during failures.
Solution Approach 2:
A shared conference store is introduced as an intermediary between collaboration servers and conference information. This shared store maintains static conference information that can be accessed by any server, enabling seamless failover and reconnection without data loss, thus improving reliability while minimizing reconnection delays.
2Reliability
If redundant servers maintain hard replicas of conference information, then system reliability improves during server failures, but device complexity and costs increase
Solution Approach 1:
Multiple collaboration servers merge their access to a single shared conference store, eliminating the need for each server to maintain separate hard replicas of conference information. This consolidation maintains reliability through shared access while reducing the overall system complexity and resource requirements compared to full redundancy.
Solution Approach 2:
The shared conference store serves as a universal resource that all collaboration servers can access, replacing the need for individual server-specific replicas. This multi-functional shared store provides the same reliability benefits as redundant servers but with reduced complexity, as it serves multiple purposes: storing static conference information, enabling failover, and supporting multiple servers simultaneously.
Data Source
AI summary
A method, system, and architecture for providing a conference system that effectively achieves high availability conferencing is provided. The conference system architecture provides a conference system that comprises a set of stateless conference servers and a shared conference store to provide highly available conferencing to its users. The conference servers serve (host) conferences (meetings) that allow users to conduct distributed conferences. Each conference server generally performs conference provisioning operations and conference control operations. The shared conference store provides for the storage of conference state information, thus allowing the conference servers in the conference server pool to be stateless by maintaining conference state information on the shared conference store. A stateless conference server may also locally maintain, for example, in cache memory, some of the conference state information that is maintained on the shared conference store.