- Sources: Cloudflare, discussion
- Summary: The post, dated 2026-07-31, states that provisioning a relay creates an isolated scope across the existing network rather than starting a virtual machine, container, or process, so a relay is closer to a virtual host than a new server. Tokens grant publish, subscribe, or both on a single relay, can carry an expiry, and can be revoked individually, which is what the previous unauthenticated global endpoint could not do and why Cloudflare says it suited protocol testing rather than production. Relays now support draft-14 and draft-16 of the IETF MoQ Transport protocol, and draft-16 adds PUBLISH, which lets a publisher push a track to the relay before any viewer subscribes, and SUBSCRIBE_NAMESPACE, which covers tracks added later in a stream. Cloudflare is documenting the control plane as the MoQ CDN Provisioning Internet-Draft, which calls the resource a scope. It is free during beta and Cloudflare says the API will change.
- Why it matters: Per-relay tokens with expiry and individual revocation are the minimum a live media deployment needs before it can carry real traffic, which the previous shared endpoint did not offer.
- Follow-up: A common provisioning model across relay providers is proposed rather than settled, so track whether the MoQ CDN Provisioning draft is adopted.
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