With WebRTC officially designated as a web standard by W3C and IETF, it’s quickly become the most influential technology for real-time developers.
Among the many use cases? Live video/audio streaming, collaboration and communication tools, Internet of Things, machine learning, virtual reality gaming, and more.
TURN servers, used to connect sessions when no direct route is available, are critical for most WebRTC deployments. But, the dominant paradigm around how to optimize TURN server deployment has evolved in the last two years.
Tsahi Levent-Levi, a noted writer and expert in the WebRTC space, touched on this in a recent post describing how managed TURN delivers speed and simplicity compared to self-hosting/using coturn.
“It isn’t about whether you should use a managed WebRTC TURN service or deploy your own – it should be which managed WebRTC TURN service to select. Why? Because this is super simple to adopt and replace with zero vendor lock-in.Pricing is important, but also global footprint, latency, and quality. Then there are things like actually doing its job – the percentage of successful connections you get with it.”
To Levent-Levi’s point, just as end-users of real-time applications expect quality connections with low latency, the future of TURN deployment hinges on developers being able to onboard responsive and easy to adopt options, too.
And, it points to a more significant shift: what if the network itself offered TURN service?
While managed TURN is a relatively new category, WebRTC-CDN represents a significantly different future for developers and businesses that use WebRTC.
That landscape does not require end-user hardware or configuration changes, and implementation is completed via a simple API. It also provides always-on protection against hackers coordinating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.