How I Split My Livestream Archive at Shiftbloom Studio

With shiftbloom studio. I build tools and projects about a variety of experimental approaches to real-world problems. The issue for such use-case often was how most small media systems start out: one big always-on recorder that keeps costing money even when nothing is happening. For live capture you obviously need to stay ready at all times — sometimes you can’t risk losing the first minutes. But for everything else it’s complete overkill. The Core Problem Backfills, VOD downloads, clip imports, repairs and re-encodes are queue work. They can wait a few seconds, run on burst capacity, or even on a regular VPS or laptop. They don’t need the same always-hot infrastructure as the live recorder. That’s why I split the system. Instead of one large monolith, I deployed: Observer cells — only for live streams (time-critical) Harvest cells — for all queue processing (can be delayed) The Three Roles 1. Mothership A small control-plane cron job. It checks queue sizes, currently live channels and running observer tasks, then decides: how many harvest cells should exist right now which channels need an observer cell It’s intentionally simple. The database remains the single source of truth. 2. Observer Cells Each observer cell records exactly one live channel. It receives its assignment through environment variables: +++env OBSERVER_VOD_ID OBSERVER_CHANNEL_ID OBSERVER_CHANNEL_LOGIN OBSERVER_CHANNEL_NAME +++ It starts recording immediately, writes HLS segments to object storage, sends heartbeats, and waits a short standby window after the stream goes offline. This window is important because streams sometimes drop and reconnect quickly. Without it you end up with many small broken VOD fragments. 3. Harvest Cells These handle all background work: downloading VODs, re-encoding, recovering broken files, etc. They can run anywhere Docker is available — AWS tasks, a small VPS, or even a spare laptop. They only need outbound access to Postgres and object storage. What Changed Previous