On August 23, 2023, Arin Sime welcomed Renan Dincer for an interactive discussion about the ingest and streaming of low latency, high availability video at global scale using Anycast Routing and other routing protocols.
Renan is Engineering Manager at Cloudflare. He spoke first about his work first in the development of the one-to-many broadcasting platform, Cloudflare Stream. And then Cloudflare Calls, which is more like a SFU, allowing for multiple participants.
Renan shared his enthusiasm for how traditional WebRTC helps make low latency broadcasting possible. He and Arin also discussed other low latency streaming protocols such as WebRTC WHIP/WHEP, UDP, SRT, HLS, TCP, and RTMPS. The OBS broadcasting tool was another discussion point, and how you can now stream with more complex tools like that or using more shrink-wrapped solutions like StreamYard from HopIn. They also discussed other use cases beyond broadcasting where Cloudflare uses WebRTC.
The conversation then moved to the main topic of the day: Anycast routing. This is a networking technique used in large-scale, global media applications that require high availability and low latency. Many have considered using Anycast for WebRTC because of its potential to reduce latency.
Renan explained how Anycast routing “breaks the assumptions we make about computers” because not every server has to have a unique addressable IP address. This is obfuscated for a more globally scalable architecture. He explored the benefits of Anycast routing and Cloudflare’s experience deploying it at scale.
For the complete discussion:
Watch Episode 82!
Bonus Content!
“WebRTC Application Launch Day: A Cautionary Tale”.
Up Next! WebRTC Live Episode 83: Must-Have Design Elements for Successful Video Applications
Wednesday, September 20 at 12:30 pm Eastern
with WebRTC.ventures Lead UI Designer, Daniel Philips
