moq-rs (Cloudflare)

Language: Rust Organization: Cloudflare Maintainer: Mike English (@englishm) GitHub: cloudflare/moq-rs (was englishm/moq-rs) Slack: moq-rs (C09CG9V7A2Y) — shared channel, covers both this and moq-dev

Overview

Cloudflare’s Rust implementation of IETF MoQ Transport. Provides both relay and client functionality, strictly following the IETF MoQ working group specifications. One of the most active implementations in the ecosystem.

History

Timeline:

• 2022-06-29: Luke Curley creates kixelated/warp (Go implementation)
• 2023-04–05: Luke rewrites from Go to Rust (PR #15, May 22)
• Mid-2023: Mike English begins collaborating closely with Luke — near-daily discussions on codebase design and the evolving IETF MoQ Transport spec. Mike’s contributions include early containerized relay deployments (Fly.io, GKE), the first MoQT client publisher (moq-pub), an exploration of C FFI for ffmpeg (englishm/libmoq), and an update to support draft-ietf-moq-transport-04. See Mike’s pre-fork commits.
• 2024-10-07: Luke publishes his “Fork” blog post, stepping away from the IETF WG to focus on moq-lite/Transfork
• 2024-10-15: Mike creates englishm/moq-rs (fork of Luke’s repo) to maintain IETF WG alignment
• Later: Transferred to Cloudflare as cloudflare/moq-rs

The two projects are now considered sibling implementations — neither is upstream of the other. See moq-dev for Luke’s original project.

Key Contributors

• Mike English (@englishm) — Maintainer. Joined during the Go→Rust transition as a close collaborator.
• Manish (@itzmanish) — Cloudflare developer, currently working on draft-16 support (PR #170)
• Jacob (@nnazo) — Cloudflare developer working on the MoQ relay service
• Scott Godin (@sgodin) — Did the bulk of the draft-07 → draft-14 message migration
• Zafer Gurel (@zafergurel) — Substantial early contributions to moq-transport protocol messages; went on to create moqtail
• See the full contributors page

Draft Support

• main branch: draft-14 (IETF WG spec) — current production deployment
• draft-18: draft-18-dev branch behind the runner-registered moq-rs-draft-18 relay; the request-stream rework (PR #178, removes MAX_REQUEST_ID, moves requests to bidi streams) merged in the July-8 burst. SUBSCRIBE_NAMESPACE support (PR #187, itzmanish/Manish) merged to main July 19, and draft-18-dev was rebased onto main the same day to prep the Vienna Hackathon relay
• draft-16: the long-open community rewrite (PR #170, itzmanish) merged July 8; its follow-on PUBLISH message support (PR #181, +4049/−624) merged July 9
• Latest release: moq-relay-ietf v0.7.25 (July 31) — the batch that shipped the relay upstream-retention fix — with moq-pub v0.9.3 / moq-sub v0.4.14 / moq-clock-ietf v0.6.20 / moq-api v0.2.13 / moq-test-client v0.1.12, following the July-20 v0.7.24 (moq-native-ietf v0.10.0, PR #190) and July-19 v0.7.23 SUBSCRIBE_NAMESPACE batches. Bug issue #191 (dmorn) — the relay retains an upstream track subscription after the last downstream subscriber leaves — was fixed July 30 by PR #196 (release upstream subscriptions for idle cached tracks) and backported to the draft-14 main branch July 31 by PR #198 (+1986/−163), with a companion ordering fix PR #197 (wait for upstream subscription before sending SUBSCRIBE_OK, +477/−55) — all cut in v0.7.25
• Historical branches: draft-04, 05, 06, 07

Public Infrastructure

• Anycast relays:
  • draft-14.cloudflare.mediaoverquic.com:443 (draft-14)
  • draft-07.cloudflare.mediaoverquic.com:443 (draft-07, deprecated)
• Interop relays (with mlog capture):
  • interop-relay.cloudflare.mediaoverquic.com:443 (draft-14)
  • draft-16-manish.cloudflare.mediaoverquic.com:443 (draft-16, WIP)
  • draft-18-interop.cloudflare.mediaoverquic.com:443 (draft-18, auto-deployed from draft-18-dev)
• All support raw QUIC and WebTransport on port 443
• Interop relays have --mlog-serve for debugging: /<connection-id> over HTTPS

NAB Show 2026

Cloudflare’s moq-rs relay network is a key component in multiple NAB demonstrations:

• Wowza + Cloudflare: Live CMAF-to-MoQ demo at booth W2300
• Bitmovin Player Web X: Sub-second playback tested against Cloudflare’s 330+ city relay network

Recent Highlights (as of July 2026)

Day-by-day PR/issue history lives in the wiki log; this section keeps only durable milestones.

• draft-18 landed and a registered relay went live. PR #173 (“Start work on draft-18”, englishm) opened on the London hackathon floor June 9 and merged June 11. A rolling draft-18-dev branch (PR #176) auto-deploys to draft-18-interop.cloudflare.mediaoverquic.com:443 and is registered in the interop-runner as moq-rs-draft-18 — closing a long-standing two-draft gap (main stays draft-14).
• draft-18 request-ID removal. PR #178 (englishm) removes MAX_REQUEST_ID and moves requests onto bidi streams — the direction the WG converged on (cf. moq-transport Issue #1653); merged in a July-8 burst that also landed the long-open community draft-16 rewrite (itzmanish) and a moq-relay-ietf v0.7.21 release.
• Pluggable AuthHook / relay authorization. PR #169 (englishm) proposed an AuthHook trait for intra-scope relay authorization; PR #171 (Suhas) implemented it with new moq-auth and moq-auth-cat crates (C4M — CAT for MoQ). Thibault Meunier’s review pushed the trait toward issuer-aware challenge/reply so it also fits PrivacyPass. Both OPEN as the shared coordination venue.
• draft-16 rewrite + PUBLISH support. Manish closed his 155-day-old PR #131 and reopened it as PR #170 (“[Rewrite] Draft-16 migration”), the underlying draft-16 baseline (merged July 8). Its large follow-on PR #181 (“Publish message support”, +4049/−624) merged July 9, adding native PUBLISH-message handling and triggering a moq-relay-ietf v0.7.22 / moq-pub v0.9.0 release round.
• Namespace pub/sub and qlog alignment. PR #157 (Suhas) added Publish/Subscribe Namespace support with a new relay subscriber_registry; PR #163 (mike-english) aligned mlog qlog output with draft-pardue-moq-qlog-moq-events-03.
• draft-18 SUBSCRIBE_NAMESPACE + Vienna Hackathon prep. PR #187 (Manish) landed SUBSCRIBE_NAMESPACE on main July 19, and draft-18-dev was rebased onto main the same day for the IETF-126 Hackathon relay — cut as moq-relay-ietf v0.7.23 (+ moq-pub v0.9.1 / moq-sub v0.4.12 / moq-clock-ietf v0.6.18 / moq-test-client v0.1.10). At the Hackathon the draft-18-interop.cloudflare.mediaoverquic.com:443 relay was “back to the initial draft-18 features + PUBLISH and SUBSCRIBE_NAMESPACE” (mike-english), though testers (Miniero, Kota Yatagai) still saw SUBSCRIBE not reaching the publisher — an in-progress gap Mike is debugging for Friday’s interop report.
• Relay plumbing. A socket_wrapper hook to wrap the underlying UDP socket landed (PR #174, merged June 10); a proposed warm-cache-linger + upstream UNSUBSCRIBE scheme for propagating downstream interest loss is under review (PR #180, OPEN).
• Relay upstream-retention fix — merged, then shipped. PR #196 (mike-english, +1740/−150, merged July 30) releases upstream subscriptions for idle cached tracks and stops FIN-ing subgroup streams mid-object — fixing the issue #191 bug where the relay held an upstream subscription after the last downstream subscriber left (the same relay-lifecycle class as moqtail issue #332). It was then backported to the draft-14 main branch July 31 (PR #198, +1986/−163) with a companion ordering fix (PR #197 wait for upstream subscription before sending SUBSCRIBE_OK, +477/−55) and shipped as the moq-relay-ietf v0.7.25 release train (July 31) — the repo’s first tagged release since July 20 and a durable correctness gain on the recurring post-Vienna relay-resource-lifecycle front.

Interop

• Registered in interop-runner as moq-rs (draft-14), moq-rs-draft-16, and moq-rs-draft-18
• moq-rs-draft-16 ←> moxygen: 12 pass in interop runner

Related

• moq-dev - Luke Curley’s original project (moq-dev/moq), sibling implementation
• moq-js - IETF-aligned JavaScript companion (video-dev/moq-js)
• interop-status - Cross-implementation testing
• interop-endpoints - Full endpoint listing