Serveless is a technology that has been around for a while and was popularized by Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Lambda functions. Serverless does hav

How to Leverage the AWS WebSocket API for Serverless WebRTC signaling - webrtcHacks

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2021-05-25 13:00:14

Serveless is a technology that has been around for a while and was popularized by Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Lambda functions. Serverless does have servers, but as a developer you don’t need to think about that – you just push / paste your code and deploy and the serverless infrastructure takes care of all the other aspects needed to deploy that code. While WebRTC’s peer connections are peer-to-peer, a server is needed to facilitate WebRTC’s offer answer mechanism. Can serverless be used to solve WebRTC’s signaling server problem?

The answer is – yes. Edward Burton, CTO of start-up yown.it , shows all the details how below. yown.it is an ecommerce platform that uses WebRTC to let businesses interact with their customers live over audio and video. Like many sites, they need some kind of server-side infrastructure for handling more than WebRTC signaling. And like many businesses of all sizes, they wanted to leverage modern, cloud-oriented architectures as much as possible.

In this post, Edward shows how they leveraged a serverless architecture to setup their WebRTC signaling. They used AWS’s API Gateway WebSocket API to terminate WebSockets and invoke AWS serverless Lambda functions. While there is no universal or best way to handle signaling for WebRTC, this is a great example of one way to do it.