Do I need a global Redis instance for multi-region LiveKit deployments?

This question originally came up in our Slack community and the thread has been consolidated here for long-term reference.

For multi-region deployments, do we need a global Redis instance?

I was reading the scaling WebRTC blog post and it seems that every datacenter/region has its own Redis (Message Bus), with inter-datacenter communication happening via Media Relay.

The mesh system described in that blog post is specific to LiveKit Cloud, our commercial product.

LiveKit’s open source media server supports multi-region deployments, but those regions do not communicate with one another out of the box. Each region operates independently with its own Redis instance.

The media relay logic for cross-region communication is not available in the self-hosted version.