150 Videos a Day Buried Our CPU Transcoders, So I Stopped Encoding In-House

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0530

In the last chapter we owned the whole video pipeline: content uploaded to an S3 ingest bucket, a Celery worker on ECS ran ffmpeg to build the adaptive-bitrate ladder, and CloudFront served the HLS chunks. It worked beautifully the day I demoed it with three test videos. Then the content team found the bulk uploader.

I opened Grafana on a Tuesday and the transcode_video queue depth was a straight diagonal line, climbing since nine that morning. Not a spike that drains — a line that only went up. The team had discovered they could select a course’s entire back-catalogue and push it in one sitting, and they were doing exactly what a good content team should do: 150-plus videos before lunch. My CPU workers were going to be chewing on that pile until Friday.

Video-Transcoding on Kuldeep Pisda

150 Videos a Day Buried Our CPU Transcoders, So I Stopped Encoding In-House