Netflix Live Origin

This post describes the Netflix Live Origin server, a custom microservice that brokers live streaming content between cloud encoding pipelines and the Open Connect CDN.

• •Live Origin is multi-pipeline and multi-region aware, selecting the first valid segment from redundant pipelines using lightweight media inspection metadata from the packager to detect defects.
• •To reduce unnecessary upstream requests, Open Connect Appliances use segment templates to reject out-of-range requests, while Live Origin returns cacheable 404s with expiration policies for segments not yet available.
• •Live Origin holds open early requests for the next segment instead of returning 404, reducing network chatter; millisecond-grain caching was added to nginx to support 2-second segment intervals.
• •HTTP response headers are used to propagate streaming event notifications cumulatively through Open Connect nodes to all client devices regardless of playback position.