Relay Infrastructure at WhatsApp Scale
summary
WhatsApp relays more than a billion calls daily using a global fabric of thousands of PoPs and per‑region clusters with hundreds of relay containers, automatic scaling and prioritization that favors ongoing and one‑on‑one calls during spikes. The relays cache and retransmit dropped packets, perform bandwidth estimation to prevent congestion, use selective forwarding and video simulcast to conserve battery and serve asymmetric networks, and persist minimal metadata in a state server so connections survive container failures and upgrades.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Start
- 3:05What is a relay?
- 7:03Problem of too many streams in a group call Resource Usage
- 9:18Problem of asymmetric networks
- 9:49Solving for asymmetric networks
- 13:27Throttling to prevent catastrophic failure
related talks
43mHow WhatsApp moved 1.5B users across data centers
19mPrivate Calling at WhatsApp
49mThat's 'Billion' with a 'B': Scaling to the Next Level
35mScaling Erlang cluster to 10,000 nodes
53mA Million Video Calls a Day, or Call Your Mom
20mRevolutionizing Customer Engagement with a Cutting Edge CPaaS Solution
29mDealing with Unreliable Networks
02mHighlights - What's Up WhatsApp?
