How Buildly Delivered MediaMash — a Containerised Web Conferencing Platform Supporting 125 Concurrent Sessions — in 5.5 Months with Kubernetes and WebRTC

Client

Buildly is an open-source platform company focused on enabling developers and enterprises to build and deploy containerised, cloud-native applications without vendor lock-in. Its approach centres on microservices architecture, infrastructure portability, and open standards — principles that shaped every aspect of the MediaMash brief. When the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated demand for enterprise-grade remote conferencing, Buildly identified a gap: no available web conferencing platform was designed for self-hosted, containerised deployment with the operational controls that enterprise clients require. Buildly engaged Ajackus to build MediaMash from the ground up to fill that gap.

Challenge

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced enterprises to operate remotely, demand for web conferencing tools surged — but the solutions available shared a fundamental flaw: they were centralised, proprietary, and impossible to self-host or control at the infrastructure level. Research at the time showed that 78% of corporate companies could not effectively host and manage large-scale virtual conferences or live-stream them to their required audience sizes. For Buildly, whose entire platform philosophy is built on open-source, containerised, cloud-portable infrastructure, this gap was not just a market opportunity — it was a direct challenge to address with the principles it already stood for.

The brief given to Ajackus was unusually constrained: build a production-ready web conferencing platform that could be containerised, replicated across environments, and operated with full enterprise control — without depending on any proprietary conferencing vendor. Every architectural decision had to remain true to Buildly’s open-source ethos.

No Self-Hostable Enterprise Conferencing Solution

Available conferencing platforms in 2020 were either consumer-grade tools with limited administrative control, or enterprise platforms requiring significant proprietary lock-in. No production-ready, self-hostable conferencing system existed that could be deployed inside Buildly’s containerised architecture and operated with full operator control over rooms, hosts, participants, and live-stream configuration.

Containerisation Architecture Complexity

Integrating a real-time WebRTC-based conferencing system into a Kubernetes-managed microservices environment is architecturally non-trivial. WebRTC’s reliance on direct peer connections, media servers, and network traversal (STUN/TURN) presents specific challenges when abstracted behind container networking. The Ajackus team had to engineer a deployment model where the Janus WebRTC server operated correctly and performantly within Kubernetes pod constraints, while maintaining the isolation and scalability benefits of containerised architecture.

Enterprise Scale and Administrative Control Requirements

Enterprise conferencing at meaningful scale — 100+ guests per event, live-streaming to external audiences, advertisement display, and host management — requires a different engineering approach from building a standard video call. The platform needed granular administrative controls: room creation and management, host permissions, stream configuration, and real-time monitoring — all accessible to the operator without requiring engineering intervention for each event.

Infrastructure Replication for Open-Source Distribution

A core requirement of the Buildly model is that environments must be replicable — clients should be able to stand up their own instances of the platform without bespoke infrastructure work for each deployment. This demanded Infrastructure as Code from the outset, not as a later optimisation. Terraform and Helm configurations had to be production-quality and documented well enough to enable reliable environment replication by operators who had not built the original system.

Multi-Platform and Multi-Device Compatibility

Enterprise conference participants join from a wide range of devices and environments: desktop browsers, mobile phones, edge devices, and varying operating systems. The platform had to deliver a consistent, functional conferencing experience across this full matrix of device types and browser configurations — a requirement that significantly increased the testing surface and demanded careful abstraction of the media-handling layer.

Goals

The MediaMash build required a platform that embodied open-source principles at the infrastructure level whilst delivering enterprise-grade performance and control at the application level.

Journey

The Ajackus team took end-to-end ownership of the MediaMash platform — from architecture design through to production deployment — operating as the core engineering team throughout the 5.5-month engagement. The Ajackus team structured the build around four parallel workstreams: WebRTC media server integration, Kubernetes containerisation, infrastructure automation, and application feature development. Rather than treating infrastructure as a deployment concern to be addressed after the application was built, the Ajackus team designed infrastructure and application in lockstep — a deliberate decision that ensured the containerised architecture constraints were embedded in the platform’s design rather than retrofitted.

WebRTC Integration with Janus Media Server

The foundation of the MediaMash platform is the Janus open-source WebRTC server, selected by the Ajackus team for its flexibility, active community, and suitability for containerised deployment. Integrating Janus into a Kubernetes environment required resolving the specific network traversal challenges that WebRTC presents in containerised contexts — STUN/TURN configuration, media port management, and peer connection negotiation within pod networking constraints. The Ajackus team engineered the Janus deployment to maintain the full real-time audio and video performance characteristics expected of enterprise conferencing, without sacrificing the scalability and isolation benefits of Kubernetes orchestration.

Kubernetes-Based Containerised Architecture

The Ajackus team designed MediaMash as a microservices platform orchestrated by Kubernetes, with Docker as the containerisation layer for each service component. This architecture was chosen for its alignment with Buildly’s open-source philosophy and for its practical consequence: each component of the conferencing platform — media server, room management, host controls, live-streaming — is independently deployable, scalable, and maintainable. The Kubernetes orchestration layer ensures that the platform can sustain 125 concurrent playback sessions by routing load across available container instances without manual intervention.

Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and Helm

A defining requirement of the Buildly engagement was environment replicability: operators needed to be able to stand up their own MediaMash instances without bespoke infrastructure work. The Ajackus team implemented the full infrastructure layer using Terraform for cloud resource provisioning and Helm for Kubernetes application packaging. This combination allows a new MediaMash deployment to be instantiated on either AWS or GCP through a structured, version-controlled process — eliminating the manual configuration effort that typically makes self-hosted conferencing platforms impractical to distribute at scale.

Conference Feature Development and Multi-Platform Testing

Alongside the infrastructure and media server work, the Ajackus team built the full set of conference management features: online conference hall creation and host management, meeting environment controls and configurations, global live-streaming capability, and advertisement display integration. Each feature was built with operator control as the primary design principle — ensuring that conference hosts can manage events without engineering support. The Ajackus team conducted systematic cross-platform testing across edge devices, smartphones, and the major browser and operating system combinations to ensure consistent performance across the full range of participant device types.

Results

MediaMash launched as a production-ready web conferencing platform within 5.5 months, delivering enterprise-scale event capacity, full operator control, and cloud-portable infrastructure — earning critical market acclaim and validating Buildly’s open-source conferencing approach.

What went well:

Operational Achievements

• Full production platform — Kubernetes-orchestrated, multi-cloud, enterprise conference-capable — delivered in 5.5 months from engagement start
• Host management, room configuration, live-streaming, and advertisement controls operational from day one, allowing Buildly to run events without any engineering dependency
• Environment replication enabled via Terraform and Helm, so new MediaMash instances can be stood up on AWS or GCP through a structured, repeatable process
• Cross-platform compatibility validated across edge devices, smartphones, and major browser and operating system combinations at launch

Technical Achievements

• Janus WebRTC server integrated into Kubernetes pod networking with full real-time audio and video performance, resolving the container-networking challenges inherent to WebRTC deployment
• 125 concurrent playback sessions supported by Kubernetes-managed horizontal scaling across containerised service components
• Microservices architecture ensures each platform component — media server, room management, streaming, host controls — is independently deployable and scalable
• Full Infrastructure as Code implementation with Terraform and Helm enables cloud-portable, version-controlled environment replication across AWS and GCP
• Docker containerisation of all platform services provides consistent, environment-agnostic deployment with no dependency on host-level configuration

Business Validation

• MediaMash was critically acclaimed and well received by the market at launch, validating both Buildly’s open-source conferencing thesis and Ajackus’s delivery execution
• The platform’s commercial success directly contributed to VinoShares becoming a subsequent Buildly client — a concrete business-outcome signal of the engagement’s impact
• The open-source, self-hostable architecture positions MediaMash as a differentiated enterprise conferencing option in a market dominated by proprietary, vendor-controlled platforms