Cloudflare has taken a major step in its real-time media infrastructure by introducing a provisioning API for its Media over QUIC (MoQ) service. Last year, Cloudflare turned every server in its network into a MoQ relay, enabling low-latency media streaming over QUIC. Now, developers can provision their own isolated relays, gaining fine-grained control over who can publish and who can only watch.
Here are the key changes:
- New provisioning API: Use endpoints like
POST /relaysto create an isolated relay, andGET /relaysto list your relays. Each relay is assigned a unique identifier (relay_id) used in subsequent requests. - Access control: Specify publisher and subscriber lists via JSON payloads. For example, set
"publishers": ["user1", "service-account"]to restrict publishing, while"subscribers": ["*"]allows anyone to watch. This enables secure, token-based access per relay. - Isolation: Unlike the shared default relays, isolated relays operate in a separate namespace, ensuring that traffic does not interfere with other tenants. This is crucial for production workloads with strict performance or security requirements.
- Integration with existing MoQ clients: The relays are compatible with standard MoQ clients (e.g., using
moq-rsormoq-js), so you can start publishing/subscribing immediately using your existing code, just point it to your new relay's endpoint. - Rate limits and quotas: The API includes per-account rate limiting and configurable quotas on the number of relays and concurrent sessions, giving predictable scaling behavior.
For developers, this is a game-changer for building real-time applications like live streaming, interactive video, and collaborative tools. Previously, you had to rely on Cloudflare's public relays, which offered no isolation or access control. Now you can create dedicated relays for each tenant or feature, enforce authentication at the relay level, and avoid noisy-neighbor issues. The API is RESTful and returns standard JSON responses, making automation straightforward—perfect for CI/CD pipelines that spin up relays on demand.