LiveKit can run on Kubernetes without hostNetwork, which lets self-hosted LiveKit scale like any other workload and run in clusters that don’t allow host networking. Its pods stay private behind an ordinary ClusterIP Service, and STUNner, a Kubernetes-native TURN server, provides the single public address that WebRTC
Self-hosting a voice AI pipeline gives you control that managed APIs can’t offer: you choose the models, you decide where they run relative to each other, and you keep audio data within your own infrastructure. Getting there means managing GPU workloads, model placement, and service networking yourself.
The Janus WebRTC Server is one of the most pleasant WebRTC media servers to build on, and it’s a bonus that it is open source. It’s small, fast, and modular: a thin C core with plugins for exactly the workloads you need, a clean signaling API, and
WebRTC.ventures recently completed a Kurento to LiveKit migration for a client running one of the more complex real-time platforms we’ve worked on, and we did it without downtime. The platform had conferences, webinars, inbound telephony (call center), outbound telephony, recordings, and live transcription and translation in English
