# Difficulty Exposing Janus UDP Ports on AWS CloudFormation

**URL:** <https://janus.discourse.group/t/difficulty-exposing-janus-udp-ports-on-aws-cloudformation/169>\
**Category:** General\
**Created:** [April 15, 2023, 6:01pm UTC](https://janus.discourse.group/t/difficulty-exposing-janus-udp-ports-on-aws-cloudformation/169 "2023-04-15T18:01:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Koyukan](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/janus.discourse.group/koyukan/32/52_2.png) [@Koyukan](https://janus.discourse.group/u/Koyukan)\
**Post date:** [April 15, 2023, 6:01pm UTC](https://janus.discourse.group/t/difficulty-exposing-janus-udp-ports-on-aws-cloudformation/169/1 "2023-04-15T18:01:40Z")

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Hello everyone,

As a first-time poster, I’d like to express my gratitude to the Janus team for creating such an incredible product. Working with the Janus platform and exploring its fantastic features has been a lot of fun.

I’ve been building a web application on my local machine, and now it’s time to deploy it to the cloud and test it. All my services are dockerized, and I used docker-compose to deploy the app on my docker system. I used macvlan, so all my ports were accessible, and everything was running smoothly.

For the final product, I decided to use AWS. I created my stack definition in compose format and used the AWS CLI to transpile it into a CloudFormation template (YAML). All my web services seem to be working fine, except I’m having difficulty exposing the RTP-ports that Janus uses. I restricted my Janus ports to 20000-25000 and added that to my docker-compose. However, when the AWS CLI transpiles my compose file into a CloudFormation template, it creates a set of resources such as a load balancer entry, security group, etc. for every single port. This is problematic because I can only create 500 resources.

I’m seeking advice on how to properly expose my Janus UDP ports in my AWS CloudFormation template. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!

```auto
version: "3.9"

services:
.
.
.
  janus:
    image: myECR/Janus
    networks:
      - frontend
      - backend
     ports:
      - 80:80
      - 7088:7088 
      - 8088:8088 
      - 8188:8188
      - 20000-20500:20000-20500/udp
    deploy:
      replicas: 2

networks:
  frontend:
  backend:

volumes:
  recording-data:

```

Kaan.

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**Author:** ![jmfk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e274bd/32.png) [@jmfk](https://janus.discourse.group/u/jmfk)\
**Post date:** [April 24, 2023, 6:30am UTC](https://janus.discourse.group/t/difficulty-exposing-janus-udp-ports-on-aws-cloudformation/169/2 "2023-04-24T06:30:42Z")

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I assume when you say “AWS CLI transpiles my compose file”, it creates a config for a AWS managed container service?

It has been a while since I used AWS managed containers (ECS, Fargate), but I have recent experience with Cloud Run, the equivalent on Google Cloud.

My experience with those managed container services so far has been that they are not useful when you need a high degree of control over your networking. They are fine for the common use case of “stateless HTTP[S] server”, but that’s pretty much it. The abstractions they have just don’t fit:

- There is no easy way to open an entire port range
- The load balancing is hard to get right (you need some sort of instance-sticky UDP load balancing, good luck)
- Scaling is often based on a HTTP request model, which doesn’t make sense with WebRTC/RTP

In the end, we resorted to running Janus on VM instances (EC2) via docker-compose. We have a machine template which on instantiation automatically provisions docker-compose, some secrets, and then pulls the right containers and runs them (Janus, Nginx/Caddy). The instances are ephemeral. Thanks to the template it is very easy to scale up, auto scaling is also possible with some additional work.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Koyukan](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/janus.discourse.group/koyukan/32/52_2.png) [@Koyukan](https://janus.discourse.group/u/Koyukan)\
**Post date:** [May 20, 2023, 9:03am UTC](https://janus.discourse.group/t/difficulty-exposing-janus-udp-ports-on-aws-cloudformation/169/3 "2023-05-20T09:03:49Z")

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Hello Jonathan, thanks for replying and sorry for the late reply, there was no response for a few days so I stopped checking, I still use the old forum for my investigations, didn’t see your message.

> [@jmfk](#):
>
> I assume when you say “AWS CLI transpiles my compose file”, it creates a config for a AWS managed container service?

Yes, aws cli takes Docker compose file and creates its own config file for cloud formation.

> [@jmfk](#):
>
> They are fine for the common use case of “stateless HTTP[S] server”, but that’s pretty much it.

Yes that seems to be the case. Took me for a while to understand it.

> [@jmfk](#):
>
> In the end, we resorted to running Janus on VM instances (EC2) via docker-compose.

That sounds like a great setup, thanks for sharing. I’m curious, when you say docker-compose, do you mean Docker-Swarm?

We also use EC2s, I will look into creating templates, that sounds great.

For now we fall back on Docker Swarm, which is working surprisingly good. We have a few januses, we manually load balance among them. We still have some issues, like session creation takes 8-10 seconds, which is a bit too long and some performance issues which we think is caused by the way we design the architecture.