8 posts tagged with "scalability"

If you're in the world of open-source education or communication, you owe a debt of gratitude to BigBlueButton. It was a pioneering platform that showed the world what was possible. However, as the web has evolved, the demands for scalability, developer experience, and cost-effective performance have grown exponentially.

Many long-time BigBlueButton users are now looking for a next-generation solution, one designed from the ground up to meet the new demands for scalability and flexibility that the modern web requires. This is where Plug-N-Meet comes in.

This article provides a direct, head-to-head comparison to help you understand the key differences in philosophy and technology, so you can make an informed decision about which platform is right for you.

When building any critical application, "scalability" and "high availability" (HA) are often top of mind. But for many, these terms conjure images of complex, multi-node clusters, expensive infrastructure, and a steep learning curve. The truth is, for most plugNmeet users, achieving both performance and resilience can be much simpler and more cost-effective than you might think.

This article will demystify the relationship between scalability and HA, and guide you through a pragmatic, phased approach to optimizing your plugNmeet deployment. We'll show you how to leverage the power of your cloud provider for HA, and why separating your recording server is almost always your first and best step towards true scalability.

We get the question all the time: "Can Plug-N-Meet support 3,000 attendees in a single meeting?"

The dream is huge: a massive online conference, a global product launch, or an all-hands meeting for a thousand-person company. The first instinct is to find a tool that can cram everyone into one giant virtual room.

But let me be honest: from years of experience in this industry, that approach is a technical and financial nightmare. It's a recipe for chaos, spiraling infrastructure costs, and a poor user experience.

The good news? There's a much smarter, more professional, and incredibly cost-effective way to do it. And you can do it with Plug-N-Meet.

For years, our company has been a well-known provider of BigBlueButton hosting and support services. We've deployed, managed, and scaled it for countless clients, and we have a deep respect for the role it has played in the open-source education community. It paved the way.

But after years in the trenches, supporting live sessions, online classes, and events at scale, we found ourselves running into the same fundamental walls. We weren't just using the software; we were experiencing its architectural limits firsthand. The frustration wasn't just about bugs; it was about an architecture that, while powerful for its original purpose, presented challenges for the kind of elastic scalability and developer agility that modern web applications demand.

We realized we had a choice: continue building workarounds, or take everything we had learned and build the solution we knew our users needed.

We chose to build. This is the story of why Plug-N-Meet exists.

What is a meeting recording? Is it just a collection of video and audio streams? Or is it a faithful replica of a live, interactive experience?

At Plug-N-Meet, we believe a recording should be a perfect, trustworthy artifact. When you watch it back, the whiteboard annotations should appear at the exact moment the speaker was discussing them. The chat messages should pop up in perfect sync with the conversation. The shared presentation should be exactly as the audience saw it.

To achieve this perfect fidelity, we made a deliberate architectural choice for our recorder: we record the final, rendered output, not just the individual parts. This article explains why this headless Chrome-based approach, while CPU-intensive, is fundamentally better and more reliable than the alternatives.

We are thrilled to announce a landmark update for the Plug-N-Meet ecosystem, featuring a completely redesigned client and a more powerful, scalable recorder. These updates are the result of countless hours of development aimed at enhancing user experience, boosting performance, and providing developers with even more flexibility.

We're aiming to publish the new client before Christmas, but you don't have to wait to see what's coming. You can preview the future right now! Just click the "Demo" link from our website's main menu and select the "Development version" to get a sneak peek.

Let's dive into what’s new.

For educators and institutions using Moodle, the goal is to create a seamless, engaging, and secure learning environment. However, when it's time for a live virtual class, many are forced to send their students to an external, generic video conferencing link. This experience is often disjointed, and the tools provided are frequently limited to passive screen sharing.

What if your live classroom felt like a native part of Moodle? What if you could move beyond one-way screen sharing to a truly interactive and collaborative canvas, all while maintaining the highest levels of security and performance?

By integrating the plugNmeet activity module into Moodle, you can achieve exactly that. This post explores how to leverage plugNmeet's powerful, built-in collaborative tools—the interactive whiteboard and shared notepad—to build a superior e-learning platform.

Every great application is built on a foundation of smart architectural choices. For a real-time video conferencing platform, these choices are the difference between a smooth, reliable experience and a frustrating mess of lag, dropped calls, and connection errors.

When we designed plugNmeet, we had a clear set of goals: the platform needed to be high-performance, horizontally scalable, resilient, and easy for developers to build upon. This led us to make two fundamental decisions for our backend: we chose LiveKit for our media server and NATS for our real-time messaging layer.

This article is a deep dive into the "why" behind these critical choices.