BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system for online learning. Scalelite is an open source load balancer for BigBlueButton.

BigBlueButton

A single BigBlueButton server that meets the minimum configuration supports around 150 concurrent users.

For many schools and organizations, this capacity covers their needs. They may need, for example, to hold 3 simultaneous meetings of 50 users, or 5 simultaneous meetings of 30 users, and so on. Currently, the BigBlueButton project recommends that no single meeting exceed 100 users.

However, what if a school wants to support 1,500 users across 50 simultaneous classes? A single BigBlueButton server cannot handle load. But with sufficient BigBlueButton servers and Scalelite, you could handle such a load.

Scalelite

Scalelite is an load balancer that manages a pool of BigBlueButton servers and, to any BigBlueButton front-end, such as Moodle or Greenlight, makes the pool of BigBlueButton servers appear as a single (very scalable) BigBlueButton server.

Scalelite perodically polls each server in the pool to ensure its online, ready to receive API requests, and determine its current load. With this information, when Scalelite receives an incoming API call to create a new meeting, it places the new meeting on the least loaded server in the pool. In this way, Scalelite can balance the load of meeting requests evenly across the pool.

For example, if you create pool of 10 BigBlueButton servers (which you can quickly setup using bbb-install.sh, you should be able to support 1,500 simultaneous users across many meetings (again, we recommend no single meeting exceed 100 users). If you want a larger (or smaller) capacity, you can add (or remove) servers from the pool.

Scalelite can manage a large pool of recordings. Many BigBlueButton servers will create many recordings. Scalelite can consolidate these recordings together, index them, and, when receiving an incoming getRecordings, respond much more quickly than a standard BigBlueButton server. (This piece is currently under development).

Scalelite is a Ruby on Rails application. To run Scalelite and its other components, we recommend you use the scalelite-run project, which uses Docker and docker-compose to run all the Scalelite components as docker containerss in a single server.

Configuration

For setting up the BigBlueButton servers, we recommend using bbb-install.sh as it can automate the steps to install, configure (with SSL + Let's Encrypt), and update the server when new versions of BigBlueButton are released.

To help users behind who are behind restrictive firewalls to send/receive media (audio, video, and screen share) to your BigBlueButton server, you should setup a TURN server and configure each BigBlueButton server to use it. Again, bbb-install.sh can automate this process for you.

To install and run Scalelite, see scalelite-run.

This section covers the environment variables used by Scalelite.

Environment Variables

Required

URL_HOST: The hostname that the application API endpoint is accessible from. Used to protect against DNS rebinding attacks.
SECRET_KEY_BASE: A secret used internally by Rails. Should be unique per deployment. Generate with rake secret.
LOADBALANCER_SECRET: The shared secret that applications will use when calling BigBlueButton APIs on the load balancer. Generate with openssl rand -hex 32
DATABASE_URL: URL for connecting to the PostgreSQL database, see the Rails documentation. Note that instead of using this environment variable, you can configure the database server in config/database.yml.
REDIS_URL: URL for connecting to the Redis server, see the Redis gem documentation. Note that instead of using this environment variable, you can configure the redis server in config/redis_store.yml (see below).

Optional

PORT: Set the TCP port number to listen on. Defaults to 3000.
BIND: Instead of setting a port, you can set a URL to bind to. This allows using a Unix socket. See The Puma documentation for details.
INTERVAL: Adjust the polling interval (in seconds) for updating server statistics and meeting status. Defaults to 60. Only used by the "poll" task.
WEB_CONCURRENCY: The number of processes for the puma web server to fork. A reasonable value is 2 per CPU thread or 1 per 256MB ram, whichever is lower.
RAILS_MAX_THREADS: The number of threads to run in the Rails process. The number of Redis connections in the pool defaults to match this value. The default is 5, a reasonable value for production.
RAILS_ENV: Either development, test, or production. The Docker image defaults to production. Rails defaults to development.
BUILD_NUMBER: An additional build version to report in the BigBlueButton top-level API endpoint. The Docker image has this preset to a value determined at image build time.
RAILS_LOG_TO_STDOUT: Log to STDOUT instead of a file. Recommended for deployments with a service manager (e.g. systemd) or in Docker. The Docker image sets this by default.
REDIS_POOL: Configure the Redis connection pool size. Defaults to RAILS_MAX_THREADS.

Redis Connection (`config/redis_store.yml`)

For a deployment using docker, you should configure the Redis Connection using the REDIS_URL environment variable instead, see above.

The config/redis_store.yml allows specifying per-environment configuration for the Redis server. The file is similar in structure to the config/database.yml file used by ActiveRecord. By default, a minimal configuration is shipped which will connect to a Redis server on localhost in development, and use "fakeredis" (an in-memory Redis emulator) to run tests without requiring a Redis server. The default production configuration allows specifying the Redis server connection to use via an environment variable, see below. You may use this configuration file to set any of the options listed in the Redis initializer. Additionally, these options can be set:

pool: The number of connections in the pool (should match number of threads). Defaults to RAILS_MAX_THREADS environment variable, otherwise 5.
pool_timeout: Amount of time (seconds) to wait if all connections in the pool are in use. Defaults to 5.
namespace: An optional prefix to apply to all keys stored in Redis.

Administration

Scalelite comes with a set of commands to

Add/remove BigBlueButton servers from the pool
Trigger an immediate poll of all BigBlueButton servers
Change the state of any BigBlueButton server to being available and unavailable (don't try to put new meetings on the server)
Monitor the load of all BigBlueButton servers

Server Management

Server management is provided using rake tasks which update server information in Redis.

In a Docker deployment, these should be run from in the Docker container. You can enter the Docker container using a command like docker exec -it <container name> /bin/sh

Show configured server details

./bin/rake servers

This will print a summary of details for each server which looks like this:

id: 2d2d674a-c6bb-48f3-8ad4-68f33a80a5b7
        url: https://bbb1.example.com/bigbluebutton/api
        secret: 2bdce5cbab581f3f20b199b970e53ae3c9d9df6392f79589bd58be020ed14535
        enabled
        load: 21.0
        online

Particular information to note:

id: This is the ID value used when updating or removing the server
enabled or disabled: Whether the server is administratively enabled. See "Enable/Disable servers" below.
load: The number of meetings on the server. New meetings will be scheduled on servers with lower load. Updated by the poll process.
online: Whether the server is responding to API requests. Updated by the poll process.

Add a server

./bin/rake servers:add[url,secret]

The url value is the complete URL to the BigBlueButton API endpoint of the server. The /api on the end is required. You can find the BigBlueButton server's URL and Secret by running bbb-conf --secret on the BigBlueButton server.

This command will print out the ID of the newly created server, and OK if it was successful. Note that servers are added in the disabled state; see "Enable a server" below to enable it.

Remove a server

./bin/rake servers:remove[id]

Warning: Do not remove a server which has running meetings! This will leave the database in an inconsistent state. You should either wait for all meetings to end, or run the "Panic" function first.

Disable a server

./bin/rake servers:disable[id]

Mark the server as disabled. When a server is disabled, no new meetings will be started on the server. Any existing meetings will continue to run until they finish. The Poll process continues to run on disabled servers to update the "Online" status and detect ended meetings. This is useful to "drain" a server for updates without disrupting any ongoing meetings.

Enable a server

./bin/rake servers:enable[id]

Mark the server as enabled.

Note that the server won't be used for new meetings until after the next time the Poll process runs to update the load information.

Panic a server

./bin/rake servers:panic[id]

Disable a server and clear all meeting state. This method is used to recover from a crashed BigBlueButton server. After the meeting state is cleared, anyone who tries to join a meeting that was previously on this server will instead be directed to a new meeting on a different server.

Poll all servers

./bin/rake poll:all

When you a server to the pool, it may take upwards of 60 seconds (default value for INTERVAL for the background server polling process) before Scalelite marks the server as online. You can run the above task to have it poll the server right away without waiting.

Monitoring

Check the status of the entire deployment

./bin/rake status

This will print a table displaying a list of all servers and some basic statistics that can be used for monitoring the overall status of the deployment

     HOSTNAME        STATE   STATUS  MEETINGS  USERS  LARGEST MEETING  VIDEOS 
 bbb1.example.com  enabled   online        12     25                7      15 
 bbb2.example.com  enabled   online         4     14                4       5

kepstin/scalelite