Self-hosting only the Egress service while using LiveKit Cloud — has anyone tried this?

Getting Started
1

We’re currently on the Scale plan of LiveKit Cloud for the LiveKit server, and running our agent workers on GKE. We’ve hit a bottleneck with the concurrent Egress limit (500 on the Scale plan), which is insufficient for our workload.

Ideally, we’d self-host the entire LiveKit stack to remove this constraint, but managing all components — the LiveKit server, Egress, Ingress, SIP, etc. — on GKE via Helm is operationally complex and not something we want to take on right now.

We’re therefore exploring a hybrid approach: continue using LiveKit Cloud for the LiveKit server and all other services, while self-hosting only the Egress service on GKE to bypass the cloud concurrency limit.

However, we understand that the Egress service communicates with the LiveKit server through a shared Redis instance (via messaging queues), and LiveKit Cloud does not expose its internal Redis. This raises a fundamental question about whether this hybrid topology is technically feasible at all.

Specific questions:

  1. Has anyone successfully self-hosted the Egress service against LiveKit Cloud (i.e., pointing ws_url at wss://*.livekit.cloud)? Is this architecture even supported?

  2. If it is possible, what were the main configuration or networking challenges on GKE?

  3. If it is not possible due to the Redis coupling, are there alternative workarounds short of fully self-hosting the LiveKit server?

  4. Has anyone pursued a quota increase on the Scale plan beyond the default 500 Egress concurrency limit, and was that process feasible?

Any experience or insight would be greatly appreciated.

2

Has anyone pursued a quota increase on the Scale plan beyond the default 500 Egress concurrency limit, and was that process feasible?

You can request an increase to the egress concurrency limit. You should be able to do this from your project settings page, but if not, you can contact support: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) - #8 by darryncampbell

3

Yes, its possible to have egress selfhosted and working with livekit cloud. Egress needs a few code changes for it to work - fundamentally, egress is joining a room, and recording it, so its not tied to the rtc infra. We do have such a hybrid setup for a project for separate reasons.

4

Yes, its possible to have egress selfhosted and working with livekit cloud. Egress needs a few code changes for it to work - fundamentally, egress is joining a room, and recording it, so its not tied to the rtc infra. We do have such a hybrid setup for a project for separate reasons.

@Raghu_Udiyar

thanks! we’ll try this approach. Is there any sample code to implement it?

5

I’m unable to share code, but its exactly that - have egress join the lk cloud room and record it.