September 2020 Summaries

The Mux Video API is a REST API that uses Basic Auth and HTTP requests to interact with its features. Unlike REST, GraphQL is an alternative approach where all requests are made through a single endpoint using a query language. OneGraph powers the Mux GraphQL API, allowing users to connect multiple services in one place and make queries against a single GraphQL endpoint. Gatsby, a React framework for building static sites, can utilize this GraphQL API by installing the gatsby-source-graphql plugin and configuring it to point to OneGraph.

The text discusses two outages experienced by Mux Video and the lessons learned from them. Outage 1 was related to connection pools and timeouts, where a misconfigured timeout caused all requests to be returned as errors due to increased latency. Outage 2 involved retries and timeouts, highlighting the importance of careful configuration and monitoring for optimal system performance. The author emphasizes the need for designing systems that can tolerate failures at every layer to achieve near-perfect uptime.

The text discusses the challenges of maintaining consistent video streaming quality due to potential internet-wide service outages. It explains how Mux Video, a platform that already uses multiple CDNs for content delivery, is working on improving its resilience to such issues by implementing mid-stream CDN switching. This involves using HLS Redundant Streams, which allows the player to treat multiple HLS renditions with identical characteristics as redundant sets for failover purposes. The text also provides a compatibility grid of popular video players and instructions on how to enable redundant streams in Mux Video.