from Hacker News

Cloudflare Calls Open Beta

by aofeisheng on 4/4/24, 1:02 PM with 5 comments

• by CharlesW on 4/4/24, 6:44 PM

  Actual title: “Cloudflare Calls: millions of cascading trees all the way down”

  I don’t know much about this area, but this seems pretty incredible. Is there anybody else who provides this kind of infrastructure for realtime internet communications?

• by ianschmitz on 4/7/24, 2:43 PM

  > WebRTC is the only way to send UDP traffic out of a web browser

  I guess they aren’t familiar with the newer WebTransport API?

  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebTranspor...

• by sillywalk on 4/5/24, 5:31 AM

  For those like me who didn't know what Cloudflare Calls are, and had trouble parsing the headline

  FTA:

  "Cloudflare Calls lets developers build real-time audio/video apps using WebRTC, and it abstracts away the complexity by turning the Cloudflare network into a singular SFU. In this post, we dig into how we make this possible.

  ...

  Selective Forwarding Units (SFUs) play pivotal roles in scaling WebRTC applications. An SFU functions by receiving multiple media or data flows from participants and deciding which streams should be forwarded to other participants, thus acting as a media stream routing hub. This mechanism significantly reduces bandwidth requirements and improves scalability by managing stream distribution based on network conditions and participant needs."

• by Sean-Der on 4/4/24, 3:10 PM

  Really great writeup. Stuff like this dispels the FUD that 'You can not scale WebRTC'. It for sure is harder to scale then static/loss-less content like HTTP. But I have never found it intrinsically harder then other media.

  I am heavily biased, but it really feels like an inflection point with WebRTC recently. Seeing Cloudflare put up this post, this morning I talked with a camera vendor about having WHIP support in firmware etc... exciting times for sure!