We’d like to give you an update on some forthcoming Clouden services, which we are developing and testing right now. If you are interested in what we do, please follow this blog and subscribe to our Twitter Feed for more future updates.

Clouden FM – YouTube live streaming automation

Clouden FM offers a simple way to setup a virtual radio service on YouTube Live. You upload your music as WAV files and Clouden FM plays them out to YouTube perpetually in a randomized order. We manage the Amazon AWS based playout service for you for a monthly fee, which includes a large amount of storage space for your music tracks and optionally also custom PNG backround images.

The lower level implementation of Clouden FM is based on well-tested, mature technologies such as ffmpeg, Docker and Amazon ECS. We encode the music files into video files when you upload them, so that there are as few “moving parts” as possible during the actual live streaming. This ensures a smooth and reliable streaming experience.

At the moment we are running many test streaming channels and monitoring their quality and reliability closely. We want to ensure that there are no surprises or hickups even in long-term use. When this testing is completed, we will release Clouden FM for limited public testing and eventually open the service for all subscribers.

Clouden Ping – Simple website monitoring

Clouden Ping has grown from an internal need for simple monitoring of websites and other web services. We use advanced Amazon AWS technologies, such as Lambda, SQS and DynamoDB, to implement scalable and reliable monitoring.

Since this service is rather easy to scale, we want to offer it to our customers, too. In its simplest form it will allow you to configure HTTP and HTTPS URLs that will be pinged at regular intervals, which are currently a choice of every 5 minutes, once per hour or once per day. Our plan is to offer pinging as a pay-as-you-go service, so that you will pay a small individual fraction-cent charge for each ping. This will let you save in costs if you only need infrequent pinging of a few websites.

Currently we are using Clouden Ping to monitor our own websites along with some external third-party services. Once we consider the long-term testing to be completed, we will make the service publicly available, possibly with testing period before full availability.