JANUS webRTC media and application server

My attending W3C TPAC in Lisbon, portugal, this week signs the end of my european webrtc teams tour. This post will be the first one reflecting the meetings I had. Janus has always been an interesting project. Technically, the fact that it is written in C and very small makes it one of the best server for IoT (kurento or jitsi would be less suited). Its plug-in/extention architecture,  not only keep it even leaner, but also allows to very easily build different types of media server (MCU, SFU, …) or app server (SIP Gateway, …). The IETF leveraging them to replace webex for their meetings (thousands of attendees each) and slack for their infrastructure, not only validated their product but also the market, and business viability. The danger of course is to be ONLY influenced by what I read, or people I consult for, which admittedly is too small a subset to draw any reasonable conclusion from. So I decided to hear from them.

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[rerun of 12/2015] Basis for comparison: (Web)RTC PaaS

Every month I received a certain number of newsletters from different companies. Some are really …, hum, …. entertaining with their claims. Today’s batch reminded me that one year ago almost, I published on linked in (only) some numbers for those who wanted to evaluate webRTC PaaS. It looks like it is still needed today. So here you go. [Updates and comments of the original text will be placed in italic and between braces.]

One of the most difficult thing nowadays is to read through some (web)RTC announcements. Just like everyone is claiming to be a visionary leader in LinkedIn, every companies in the space (and their moms) are “leader in the market”, “Best in their space”, “Last independent webRTC platform”, “with better technology and scalability than Twilio/Tokbox/AWS/God”. Right.

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INTEL WebRTC Collaboration suite

Intel has come a long way since 2013/2014 with their collaboration Suite for WebRTC. Today they propose one of the most complete free solution, practically a PaaS-in-a-box:

  • web (+IE plugin), mobile and windows clients,
  • a complete infrastructure
    • Media server
      • both MCU and SFU modes,
      • multi-party and broadcast
    • SIP Gateway.

This post will provide some insight on what they propose, the evolution of their offer, and what’s coming next.

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WebRTC Media Servers

Back in 2013, I did a full review, including benchmarks, of all the open source webRTC media servers. Defining use cases and corresponding tests and benchmarks was hard, and while I was happy with the results, which I presented a couple of times in conferences, the results are now grossly outdated. A year and a half ago, I tried to trigger a gathering of all the actors, as they all belong to IETF. It is very difficult for a potential user to know which project to use, and answers on the webrtc-discuss mailing list were confusing at best. We needed something more descriptive, easier to understand. I got traction from most of the players, but couldn’t make it happen. This year, hopefully, things will be different.

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