30-04-2016 SA8T2 Internal Deliverable Distributed RENdez-Vous service with Jitsi software suite SA8T2 Internal Deliverable Contractual Date: 30-04-2016 Actual Date: 30-04-2016 Grant Agreement No.: 691567 Activity: 12/SA8 Task Item: Task 2 — WebRTC Nature of Deliverable: R (Report) Dissemination Level: PU (Public) Lead Partner: NORDUnet (UNINETT) Authors: Frédéric Loui (RENATER) © GEANT Limited on behalf of the GN4 Phase 1 project. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 691567 (GN4-1). Abstract This document reports on results and findings from a technical investigation into potential deployment configurations of a federated RENdez-Vous service distributed across several NREN domains and scalable at the European level. The technology scout was conducted by the Service Activity 8 (SA8, Real Time Communication and Media), Task 2 (WebRTC) team as part of the GN4-1 project. This report should, as such, be read in context of the related work produced by GN4-1 SA8-T2. Table of Contents Executive Summary 1 1 Introduction 1 1.1 About this document 1 1.1.1 Target audience 1 1.1.2 Responsible task members 1 1.2 Background 1 1.3 Rationale 2 1.4 Technology scout objectives and methodology 2 2 Technology introduction 1 2.1 History 1 2.2 Enter WebRTC 1 2.3 About Jitsi 2 3 Why Jitsi? 3 4 Proof of Concept 4 4.1 PoC plan 4 4.2 Jitsi technology overview 4 4.3 POC set up 5 4.3.1 Jitsi Meet 5 4.3.2 Jicofo 6 4.3.3 Jitsi Videobridge 6 4.3.4 Jitsi POC configuration 6 4.4 WebRTC Technology & architectures consideration 8 4.5 Technical options for distributed Jitsi 10 4.6 Technology shortcomings in Jitsi 11 4.7 Validation of basic distributed Jitsi 14 5 Conclusions 15 Deliverable SA8T2 Internal Deliverable Distributed RENdez-Vous service with Jitsi i software suite Document Code: WebRTC Contents Table of Figures Figure 1: RENdez-Vous User Interface 5 Figure 2: Jitsi environment deployment 7 Figure 3: WebRTC full-mesh model 8 Figure 4: WebRTC MCU model 9 Figure 5: WebRTC SFU model 10 Figure 6: Approach #1 12 Figure 7: Approach #2 13 Figure 8: Approach #3 14 SA8T2 Internal Deliverable Distributed RENdez-Vous service with Jitsi ii software suite Executive Summary RENdez-Vous is a multi-party web conference service deployed by the French NREN, RENATER. The service is based on Jitsi; an open source software suite powered by WebRTC. This technology scouting report investigates potential deployment configurations of a federated RENdez-Vous service distributed across several NREN domains and scalable at the European level. The Jitsi suite is made up of three main components: Jitsi Meet — the front end user interface, e.g. where users meet via a common URL. Jitsi Videobridge — acts as a central component that relays participants’ audio, video and data streams to the other peers. Jicofo — a component between Jitsi Meet and Jitsi Videobridge responsible for room creation requests and to tie users to a room. Further investigations identify that multiple video bridges can be deployed for a Jitsi instance. A key role of Jicofo is to balance the load of the whole system by distributing rooms among available video bridges. This is how unlimited scalability can be achieved in theory. Jitsi Meet can delegate authentication to SAMLv2 IDP and thus integrate with eduGAIN so that only people belonging to this federation can spawn a virtual conference room. Jitsi Meet also provides an API that, although not yet fully mature, can be used to integrate (embed) and control meeting rooms inside other applications (in-context). Although scalability is ensured by deploying more than one video bridge, Jitsi Meet and Jicofo can be identified as single point of failure components. Jitsi Meet runs behind a web server and may thus achieve high availability. This does not apply to Jicofo, where additional development efforts are required. Blue Jimp, the company behind Jitsi, has not yet committed to development in this area. A RENdez-Vous instance constructed with one Jitsi Meet, one Jicofo and a set of Jitsi Videobridges is self contained. It cannot interact with Jitsi Meet or Jicofo components from a different instance. A number of architectures were proposed for a European R&E global context. However, after further investigation and discussions with Blue Jimp, the current 3-tier structure inherently restricts the number of possible architectures. One alternative is to deploy a global instance across Europe; i.e. one Jitsi Meet, one Jicofo and distribute video bridges across NRENs’ IaaS infrastructures. The second alternative involves building a self-contained instance within each national domains infrastructure, either managed by GEANT or the NREN. SA8T2 Internal Deliverable Distributed RENdez-Vous service with Jitsi software suite 1 Introduction A potential scenario combines 3 deployment considerations: - One single GEANT RENdez-Vous be deployed for e-infrastructure that needs multi-party video conference turn key solution from the GEANT catalogue; - GEANT creates and manages a RENdez-Vous instance for each NREN wanting to benefit from the service, but can not handle the operations themselves and do not have the adequate infrastructure to host the service; - For each NREN willing to host and operate their own service instance; re-use the service delivery model elaborated in the frame of GN4-1, GN4-2. A variant of this solution would be to have GEANT create an instance of RENdez-Vous for each NREN within each NREN’s infrastructure. SA8T2 Internal Deliverable Distributed RENdez-Vous service with Jitsi 2 software suite 1 Introduction 1.1 About this document This report documents the investigation into the technical and practical feasibility of various deployment configurations to realise a scalable multi-party web conference service based on Jitsi software. The technology scout was undertaken as part of the Geant4 Phase 1 project by the WebRTC Task 2(T2); one of three tasks of the Real Time Communication and Media activity (SA8). This report should, as such, be read in context of the related work produced by GN4-1 SA8-T2. The WebRTC task ran from 1 May 2015 to 30 April 2016. 1.1.1 Target audience This document targets technical management and specialists, in particular those working in the fields of real time communications, eLearning and eResearch. 1.1.2 Responsible task members Fréderic Loui (RENATER) had the lead on this tech scout. Jan Meijer (UNINETT) and Simon Skrødal (UNINETT) were the document editors. 1.2 Background The French NREN, RENATER, was the first NREN to provide a native WebRTC-based online desktop audio/videoconferencing service to its community. The RENdez-Vous service (https://rendez- vous.renater.fr) was set up as a pilot in the fall of 2014 and announced as a production service in March 2015. eduGAIN authentication (http://services.geant.net/edugain/Pages/Home.aspx) was added as part of RENATER's national WebRTC effort during 2015 to allow harvesting experiences from a wider user community. The service builds on the open source software product Jitsi, and is currently the only known example of a Selective Forwarding Unit system. Based on the technologies underpinning RENdez-Vous, this technology scout sought to investigate their potential in realising a larger-scale distributed service to facilitate more users in the wider GÉANT community. SA8T2 Internal Deliverable Distributed RENdez-Vous service with Jitsi software suite 1 Introduction 1.3 Rationale The RENdez-Vous service utilises the Jitsi open source software, using a Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) as a central server component rather than routing media traffic peer-to-peer. Experiences with R&E web conferencing services show online meetings of eLearners and researchers often reach a group size of 10–15 people, which is too challenging for the peer-to-peer technology used by most commercial native WebRTC solutions. It made sense to investigate the technical potential for a scalable GÉANT desktop videoconference service based on Jitsi: a distributed RENdez-Vous. 1.4 Technology scout objectives and methodology The key objectives of this technology scout were to assess whether the Jitsi software could be used to scale out to a distributed deployment supporting all of EU R&E. This would create a single distributed WebRTC desktop video conference service for all NRENs with minimal effort. Based on an assessment of various Jitsi technology options, an architecture for a distributed Jitsi deployment was defined and implemented as a PoC. The concept was (manually) validated with 2 nodes in 2 countries. Unfortunately, the project staff member undertaking the work left for a new job and there was not enough time available to replace his unique expertise in the project. As such, the automation of the process could not be validated, or tested on an even larger scale. SA8T2 Internal Deliverable Distributed RENdez-Vous service with Jitsi 2 software suite 2 Technology introduction Innovation and, more widely, open innovation are enabled by research projects involving people from different countries. These projects become de facto “global” in the geographical sense. An array of telescopes can be located in Chile or Australia, while the datacenters in charge of computing an unmatched 3D resolution representation of the galaxy is located in the NCSA (Illinois University/US) or CCIN2P3 (Lyon/France) and the astrophysicists are based in Paris or Stanford University. On the same token, open source projects such as OpenStreetMap is an iconic example of an open innovation success enabled by developers and crowds working all around the globe. 2.1 History In this context, audio/video conferencing is key for researchers participating in global projects.