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Show HN: Deploy Jitsi on AWS in 5 Minutes

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53 pointsdaenz16 comments

Author here, since I've had a question about cost/performance, I thought I'd post my experience:

I had 9 participants for 1.5 hours. Using an m5dn.xlarge, which is $0.27/hr, I peaked 13Mbit/s incoming, 23Mbit/s outgoing, 40% cpu. Over 1.5 hours I accrued 20GB outbound network, which AWS bills at $0.09/GB.

Thank you! I need this, and a cost estimate is amazing. Legend!

Nothing wrong with this if you want to use AWS and like using (or learning) associated technologies like Terraform.

And, the Jitsi Quick Start is also about five minutes and works on vanilla Ubuntu:

https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/quick-in...

This is very cool!

Does anyone have an instinct what kind of use of Jitsi you would have to have to make a more complicated infrastructure (I'm not saying containers, but maybe containers) cost-efficient?

e: To be clear, I'm fully aware that 98% of personal setups for friends or small organizations would be just fine with this setup; I'm wondering what it would take to need more.

Cost efficiency on cloud providers mostly comes down to how well utilized your fleet is. You can always waste money on idle machines. Containers help with the "packing", which in turn can help with costs. Issue being: your time is probably the most costly thing, so it's debatable unless you can get it done comfortably and happily.

There are cloud providers who already started to offer pre-configured Jitsi in containers. So there is no need to package it manually and at the same time cost efficiency is higher. Today I've tested Jitsi on Jelastic, they deploy it automatically to containers, offer automatic vertical scaling and don't stick to VMs, so there is no waste for idle machine.

If you're paying another company for hosting, and they're using containers natively, then they're just pocketing the margins by packing you onto busy hypervisors with other users.

is there a Jitsi vs Zoom breakdown somewhere? Why are more people not using Jitsi meet which is free?

My guess is because many employers had contracts with them and if you're using it at work, it's likely your go-to for leisure at least if you don't know any better about other options.

It bothers me that people are willing to jump to use their company license of zoom for personal gatherings. I have no idea if it's possible but what if a license holding company, whose employees are utilizing their zoom account, can record any sessions in use by the account?

Even if it's not possible, I hate mixing my personal life with work, and when I see the opportunity I always bring up Jitsi as an option over Zoom.

I think the key difference is that Jitsi doesn't have breakout rooms nor a desktop app. Otherwise user experience is rather similar and from my pov the Jitsi meet style with room name is much more friendly than random numbers on zoom.

There’s been interest in adding breakout rooms to Jitsi. A live demo that you can test and deploy for yourself just in GitHub pages includes a breakout rooms starting point.

Trial it here and give the issue a thumbs up if you’d like to see breakout rooms added.

https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/5550

Jitsi Meet desktop app: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases

I tried jitsi meet earlier, and the screen share quality was completely illegible, is there a setting to make this better? Zoom, Nextiva, bluejeans, slack... they all work perfectly fine...

So any advantage to the casual user to set up your own server instead of using jitsi meet?

First thing I did was increase the max frame rates & resolutions of screen sharing and webcams.

Pretty cool. Thanks for sharing!

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