The Fast and Reliable Way to Upload and Download Large Video Files in a Server Environment
In July, MASV introduced our new MASV Transfer Agent. The new MASV Agent is the beating heart of our super-reliable MASV App 2, and its release means that your development team can now start using the MASV agent to build the exceptional upload and download reliability of MASV into your transfer workflows.
We sat down with MASV CTO Majed Alhajry to learn more about the MASV agent, the MASV API and how he’s working to make it easier for developers to reliably transfer massive content.
What is MASV Agent? Who is it for?
Imagine someone trying to integrate MASV API into their workflow, which involves uploading and/or downloading data to and from MASV network. While our API gives them comprehensive access to the information they need, they will soon find out that carrying out uploads and downloads on the client-side is difficult, especially when they’re trying to do so reliably at maximum speed. With the MASV Transfer Agent, we wanted to provide developers with the ability to interact with our API while we handle the heavy lifting of client-side large file transfers, securely, reliably and fast. This is our expertise, so it only makes sense that we provide our agent as a power tool.
The transfer agent is a program that abstracts all the complexities of the file transfer. It can run as a service (headless) on all major platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux) to handle the transfer of data in and out of the MASV network. Users can interact with it via a simplified REST API to carry out tasks like uploading and downloading packages. The transfer agent manages the underlying file system, carrying out transfers at maximum speed with the reliability that our users love and trust.
You can think of the transfer agent as a remote-controlled version of our desktop app, without the user interface. You can run it locally on your machine or on your centralized transfer server.
MASV transfer agent targets power users who want to bring their integration with MASV to the next level, where they can automate the transfer of large files on top of automating their typical workflows.
The top use cases for MASV Agent among our customers and partners so far are Server-to-MASV and MASV-to-server file transfers, and the agent is performing exceptionally well in this role.
What motivated you to build the agent, instead of having users simply use the MASV transfer service?
Empowerment! We are firm believers in automation that save our customers time. Our culture is built around automating as much of your work as possible so that you can focus more on creativity rather than mundane tasks.
Automations go beyond opening a browser tab or clicking buttons on our app. That’s where the MASV transfer agent comes into play. Even very skilled developers can struggle to get consistent reliability when transferring truly enormous files, so the MASV Agent does it for you. It fills a gap by minimizing the time required to transform large file delivery workflows.
What new things can we do with MASV Agent?
Everything that can be done with our app can be done – and automated further – with the MASV transfer agent:
- Sending packages to recipients.
- Uploading packages to MASV portals.
- Downloading packages.
- Managing and running transfer automation, like automated downloads from portals.
- Enforcing upload/download speed limits.
How do I get started with the MASV Service or the MASV API?
We’ve documented both the MASV API and the MASV Agent and developers should be able to get started on their own. Simply create an account and go for it.
We’re eager to continuously improve our developer tools, so if you have feedback, or would simply like to do a deep-dive with us on your integration, simply get in touch with us via [email protected].
How does the MASV Agent compare to the MASV API?
The transfer agent is a powerful abstraction over MASV API. It’s meant to simplify interactions with our API by providing an easy REST API interface to carry out common tasks.
For example, think of the effort and calls to MASV API needed to upload a package to MASV. It involves many steps like:
- Traversing file system and collecting metadata about files and directory structures
- Creating the package on MASV API
- Calling corresponding MASV API’s to create file records
- Handling logical chunking of files
- Uploading chunks to MASV storage
- Finalizing files
- Finalizing packages
- Many other considerations for cross-platform file names/structures, filesystem differences, parallel upload of chunks, retries, recovering from software and hardware crashes, file integrity, etc.
With the transfer agent, all these steps can be done in a single API call that specifies the package info (name, recipients, etc) and the paths to files/folders the user wants to send. That’s it! Since it sits on the client-side, it has access to the filesystem, can adapt to network conditions and even survive system crashes.
Is MASV Agent the best thing you built so far this summer?
This is definitely one of the most exciting things we built this summer! Automations are the predominant “theme” this season with even more exciting capabilities in the works such as our new “Watch folders” feature for our app and “Cloud Integration,” which will provide an easier way to connect with various cloud storage providers.
What’s coming next for MASV from a developer’s perspective?
Our number one thing has to be Watch Folders. MASV Watch Folders are a natural extension of our desktop apps (Mac/Windows) and of the MASV Agent. Watch Folders make it dead simple to set up a folder which will immediately transfer a data package to a predetermined set of recipients via the MASV Transfer or MASV Portal tools. We should see Watch Folders become available later this summer and we’re excited to see what our technical users will be able to do with these.