Although Mafalda SFU is mainly focused on vertical scaling of Mediasoup and the WebRTC stack, the main problem I’ve found companies are facing is about how to easily implement Mediasoup horizontal scaling. I’ve been working on a solution for this problem for a while now, and since Mafalda is built on top of Mediasoup, it’s also needed to help it to provide transparent vertical and horizontal scaling, so let’s see how it works.

When approaching the horizontal scaling of WebRTC servers, we have two main approaches: decentralized P2P, and using a central server. Each one has its own drawbacks and advantages, and I had difficulties to identify what approach was the best, since I usually have a personal preference for pure P2P architectures, but they are not the most simple nor always the more efficient ones. So when deciding how to approach Mafalda horizontal scaling, I needed to consider the pros and cons of each use case I would need, and here we have my conclusions.

Mafalda SFU is a massively vertical and horizontal scalable SFU built on top of Mediasoup. This allow to have (theorically) unlimited sized WebRTC-based video room calls.