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Scaling Your Video Service: How Plug-N-Meet's Architecture Saves You Money

· 4 min read
Chaboud Simon
Chaboud Simon
Community & Marketing Lead

Your video service is a hit. User numbers are climbing, and engagement is high. But as you celebrate your success, a new problem emerges: your server bill is exploding. To keep up with demand, you keep buying bigger and bigger servers, paying a premium for resources that sit idle most of the day.

What went wrong? You've fallen into the monolith trap.

This post explains how Plug-N-Meet's modern, decoupled architecture is designed to prevent this exact problem, enabling you to scale your service efficiently and control your costs. For a business, this isn't just a technical detail—it's a core financial advantage.

The Monolith Trap: Paying for Empty Seats​

Many traditional video conferencing platforms are built as monoliths. This means the core application, the media processing, and the recording services are all bundled into a single, massive application.

This creates a huge problem when it's time to scale:

  • If you need to support more concurrent users, you have to upgrade the entire server, even if your recording service is barely being used.
  • If a few large recording jobs are using all the CPU, your live meetings will lag and stutter, forcing you to buy a bigger server just to handle a temporary workload.

A monolithic server is like renting a giant bus for a single passenger. You pay for all the empty seats, and if one part of the bus breaks down, the whole trip is canceled.

The Plug-N-Meet Way: A Decoupled, Intelligent Architecture​

Plug-N-Meet was designed from the ground up to avoid this trap. It is not one giant application; it is a set of specialized, independent services that work together.

The three core components are:

  1. plugnmeet-server (The Brain): A lightweight Go application that handles all the API calls, authentication, and business logic.
  2. LiveKit (The Media Highway): A high-performance, open-source media server that manages all the real-time audio and video traffic.
  3. plugnmeet-recorder (The Factory): A dedicated Go application that handles CPU-intensive tasks like MP4 recording and RTMP broadcasting.

These components are designed to be scaled independently. This is the key to cost-effective growth.

Benefit 1: Scale Only What You Need (Elastic Scaling)​

With a decoupled architecture, you can scale each component based on your actual needs.

  • Expecting a huge webinar? You don't need to touch your main application server. Simply spin up a few extra LiveKit media servers for the duration of the event, then spin them down afterward.
  • Seeing more users in a specific region? Deploy media servers in that geographic area to reduce latency, without having to replicate your entire backend.

This is like adding more cashiers to a store only during the holiday rush. You get the performance you need when you need it, and you don't pay for idle resources during quiet periods.

Benefit 2: Isolate Your Workloads (Improved Quality of Service)​

In a monolith, a resource-hungry task can degrade the entire user experience. If someone starts a large recording, everyone's live video call could suffer.

Plug-N-Meet's architecture prevents this. Because the plugnmeet-recorder is a separate service, you can run it on entirely different machines from your live media servers.

  • The Result: A CPU-intensive MP4 transcoding job will have zero impact on the quality and stability of your live meetings.
  • The Benefit: Your users always get a smooth, high-quality experience, which is critical for customer satisfaction and retention.

Conclusion: A Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)​

"Scalable" isn't just a technical buzzword; it's a business feature. The ability to scale components independently and isolate workloads means you are not constantly over-provisioning your hardware. You pay only for the resources you actually use.

As your platform grows, this intelligent design leads to a dramatically lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to a monolithic solution. You can grow your user base sustainably without your infrastructure costs spiraling out of control.

Plug-N-Meet's architecture isn't just a technical implementation detail; it's a strategic advantage designed to help your business succeed at scale.

Ready to learn more about scaling?