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Live Streaming at the Edge: Caching and Invalidation for Bluesky’s LIVE Badges

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2026-01-27

10 min read

Practical, production-tested caching and invalidation strategies to make LIVE badges and cashtags discoverable with low-latency playback at the edge.

Hook: When LIVE badges go stale, users drop off — and costs spike

Live-stream discoverability and low-latency playback are mission-critical for platforms like Bluesky now that LIVE badges and cashtags are driving discovery spikes in 2026. Engineering teams face two simultaneous pressures: deliver near-instant metadata (is this user live right now?) and stream video with millisecond-grade responsiveness — all while keeping CDN and origin costs under control. This guide lays out battle-tested caching and invalidation strategies for live at the edge: CDN streaming edges, real-time metadata caches for LIVE badges and cashtags, and TTL tuning that balances freshness with cost.

The edge landscape in 2026 — why strategies must change

Late 2025 and early 2026 accelerated two trends that directly affect live streaming architectures:

Edge compute and programmable caches (Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute@Edge, AWS Lambda@Edge) are now common in production, enabling dynamic cache control, lightweight pub/sub handlers, and on-edge logic to validate tokens and enrich metadata without hitting origin.
Low-latency streaming primitives — LL-HLS, chunked CMAF, WebTransport, and WebRTC — are supported more widely across CDNs, letting teams choose trade-offs between latency and reliability at the edge.

These advances let us move beyond blunt TTL strategies: you can combine short TTLs with edge-side invalidation and background refresh to serve accurate LIVE badges and cashtag discovery while preventing origin overload.

High-level architecture: metadata plane vs. media plane

Split responsibilities into two planes:

Metadata plane — small JSON endpoints: is_live, viewer_count, title, cashtags, preview thumbnail, stream endpoint. This drives badges and discovery lists.
Media plane — manifests and media segments used for playback (HLS/DASH chunks, WebRTC signaling channels).

Each plane has different caching patterns and latency requirements. The metadata plane needs millisecond-to-second freshness for badges and discovery. The media plane needs segment-level freshness and stable CDN caching of segments and manifests.

Pattern 1 — Real-time metadata caching for LIVE badges and cashtags

Goal: show or hide a LIVE badge within 1–3 seconds of a stream start/stop with minimal origin load.

Design

Expose a lightweight metadata endpoint per channel: /v1/stream/{channel}/status returning JSON with keys: is_live, started_at, url, tags, cashtags, thumbnail.
Cache this endpoint at the edge with a short TTL (1–5s) using Cache-Control and stale-while-revalidate for a smooth UX.
Use pub/sub or webhooks from the ingest/orchestrator to proactively invalidate or update edge caches on state changes (start/stop/quality switch).

Recommended headers

Cache-Control: public, max-age=3, stale-while-revalidate=10, stale-if-error=60
Surrogate-Key: user:12345 stream:abcde
ETag: "v1-20260117-1234"

Why this works: max-age=3 ensures a fresh response for most reads; stale-while-revalidate keeps the UI snappy while a background refresh updates the cache; stale-if-error tolerates origin outages.

Active invalidation (recommended)

Relying solely on short TTLs still creates origin spikes during heavy activity (e.g., a stream start event). Add a push invalidation flow:

Stream start: ingest/orchestrator publishes a webhook to your metadata service and a message to a pub/sub topic (e.g., Kafka, Redis Streams, or a managed pub/sub).
An edge function subscribed to the topic calls the CDN Purge API (or uses surrogate-key invalidation) to invalidate the specific metadata endpoint across POPs.
Edge functions may optionally write the new status directly to an edge cache store (Workers KV, Fastly edge dictionary) to avoid an extra origin round-trip.

Example pseudocode for a webhook handler that issues a surrogate-key purge:

// pseudocode
onStreamStart(channelId, data) {
  const key = `user:${channelId}`;
  CDN.purgeBySurrogateKey(key);
  EdgeStore.put(key, { is_live: true, ...data }, ttl=10);
}

Pattern 2 — Media plane caching: manifests and segments

The media plane must balance segment caching (for bandwidth savings) and low latency (for viewer experience).

Manifest (.m3u8/.mpd) strategy

Keep manifest TTL extremely short — typically equal to the HLS target duration or lower: 1–3× the segment duration. For LL-HLS with chunked CMAF use even shorter values (1–2s).
Set Cache-Control to private, max-age=1, stale-while-revalidate=5 for browser-fetchable manifests when they are user-specific; use public for CDN-cached manifests shared between clients. See Live Streaming Stack 2026 for protocol details and manifesto-level tuning.

Segment strategy

Cache segments aggressively at the CDN edge; their identity changes with each segment URL. Use long-ish TTLs (minutes) because segments are immutable once created.
Use cache keys that include bitrate/variant and encryption keys; avoid including client-specific tokens in cache key or use signed URLs that are part of the path (not query) when supported.

Example headers for segments:

Cache-Control: public, max-age=300, immutable
Vary: Accept-Encoding

Low-latency specifics (LL-HLS / chunked CMAF)

Use CDN support for chunked transfers and HTTP/2/3 to reduce manifest-to-segment hops.
Prefer edge origin shields and origin pools to minimize origin load when clients miss cached chunks.
When using HTTP/3/WebTransport for signaling, keep control channels at the edge with short TTLs and pub/sub invalidations for state changes.

TTL tuning: practical rules of thumb

TTL is a trade-off between freshness, cost, and latency. Use these practical buckets:

Critical metadata (LIVE badge): max-age 1–5s; stale-while-revalidate 10–30s; prefer proactive invalidation.
Discovery lists (ranked feeds with cashtags): max-age 5–30s; use cache-aside with background refresh and full reindex jobs off-peak.
Manifests: max-age equal to 0.5–1× segment duration for standard HLS; 0–2s for LL-HLS manifests.
Segments: max-age 60–900s and immutable depending on retention and segment naming.
Thumbnails/previews: max-age 60–300s with stale-while-revalidate for smoother UX.

Invalidation patterns — choose the right tool

Invalidation options and when to use them:

Short TTLs — simplest, good for low scale.
Surrogate-key purges — best for group invalidation (e.g., all endpoints for user 12345).
Keyed cache updates (edge KV writes) — fastest for metadata; write new state to the edge directly on start/stop.
Push pre-warm — after start, call the CDN to prefetch and populate caches for manifests and first segments to reduce cold-start latency.
Subscription-based invalidation — edge subscribers (Workers or edge functions) listen to a pub/sub topic and run targeted invalidation logic.

Case study: LIVE badge consistency at scale

Scenario: Bluesky introduces LIVE badges and cashtags; a popular broadcaster starts a stream and 200k users open the profile within a 30s window. Naive short TTLs will create a stampede to origin.

Resilient recipe

Metadata endpoint cached with max-age=3 and stale-while-revalidate=15.
On stream start, orchestrator publishes a webhook and writes the new state to an edge store (Workers KV / edge dictionary) and then issues a surrogate-key purge for user:{id}.
Edge functions serve the updated value directly from KV for the first 10–30s while the origin warms and segments are pushed to POPs.
Pre-warm manifests and first segments by issuing origin prefetch calls via CDN prefetch API to the streaming edge pool.

Result: badge visibility within 1–2s, negligible origin spike, and first-play latency reduced because the first segment is already cached at nearby POPs.

Troubleshooting patterns and diagnostics

When badges or playback misbehave, use the following checklist in order:

Verify cache-control headers — malformed headers cause unexpected TTLs. Use curl -I to inspect headers from edge and origin.
Check surrogate-key tagging — missing keys mean purge sweeps fail to invalidate targeted items.
Inspect CDN logs for cache hit ratio, origin request bursts, and latency by path (status endpoint vs. manifest vs. segment). See cloud-native observability writeups for log-based alert patterns.
Look for clock skew — stale-while-revalidate behaviors and ETag mismatches often come from skewed origin clocks.
Monitor propagation p95 from start event to confirmed badge visibility using synthetic checks at multiple POPs.
Token/signature issues — ensure signed URLs have appropriate expiry and are validated consistently at edge and origin.

Useful commands and checks:

// Inspect headers
curl -I https://cdn.example.com/v1/stream/123/status

// Trace cache hits using CDN API logs
// Watch origin request rate

Edge compute recipes

Edge functions add powerful tools for metadata caching and invalidation. Two lightweight recipes:

Recipe A — Webhook -> Worker; update edge cache

// Cloudflare Worker style pseudo
addEventListener('fetch', event => { ... });
addEventListener('fetch', event => {
  if (event.request.method === 'POST' && event.request.url.endsWith('/webhook')) {
    const body = await event.request.json();
    const key = `user:${body.user}`;
    await KV.put(key, JSON.stringify(body.metadata), { expirationTtl: 30 });
    // Optional: call CDN purge API for safety
    return new Response('ok', { status: 200 });
  }
});

Recipe B — Edge function resolves metadata with cache-aside

// Edge function pseudo
onRequest(req) {
  const key = `user:${id}`;
  let v = await KV.get(key);
  if (v) return new Response(v, { headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' } });
  const r = await fetch(originUrl);
  const body = await r.text();
  await KV.put(key, body, { expirationTtl: 10 });
  return new Response(body, r.headers);
}

Metrics to track (and alert thresholds)

Metadata cache hit ratio — target > 90% during normal operation; if < 70% you are hitting origin too often.
Propagation time p95 (start event -> edge response reflects state) — target < 3s for LIVE badges.
Origin request rate for metadata endpoints after a big event — set alerts for sudden spikes (e.g., 5x baseline).
First-play latency and startup rebuffer events — alert if first-play > 2s or rebuffer > 1%.

Common failure modes and fixes

Stale LIVE badge after stop: missing invalidation. Fix: ensure the stop event triggers surrogate-key purge and write false state to edge store.
Origin stampede on start: short TTLs without push invalidation. Fix: implement edge writes + purge + pre-warm segments (see local pop-up live streaming pre-warm tactics).
Segments not cached: cache key contains client-specific token. Fix: move token to header or signed path; canonicalize cache key.
High cold-start latency: no pre-warm. Fix: prefetch manifests and first segments to CDN POPs after start event.

2026 trends and future-proofing

Expect more CDN features that blur the line between metadata and media: persistent edge stores with stronger consistency SLAs, WebTransport-based streaming channels, and more pervasive native pub/sub between orchestrators and CDN POPs. Design your system so you can switch from poll-based short TTLs to event-driven propagation without reworking clients: keep metadata endpoints stable, support ETag and conditional GETs, and centralize invalidation logic in a small set of services or edge functions. For field-ready equipment and capture best practices, see field gear for events and compact rig reviews like compact streaming rigs.

In live systems, the fastest route to a better UX is often improving metadata freshness — the badge appears before the stream starts or lags behind: both kill discovery.

Actionable takeaways

Split metadata and media planes; tune TTLs per plane.
Use short TTLs + stale-while-revalidate for LIVE badges, and combine with proactive invalidation (surrogate-key purges or edge writes).
Cache segments aggressively; keep manifests extremely fresh. Pre-warm manifests/first segments when a stream starts.
Leverage edge compute to serve metadata directly and minimize origin traffic spikes. Our notes on creator capture stacks are helpful when designing client-side producers and ingest points.
Monitor propagation p95, cache hit ratio, origin request rate, and first-play latency; set tight alerts for drops in badge propagation or origin bursts. See vendor playbooks and free creative assets for synthetic test templates.

Final checklist before launch

Implement per-channel metadata endpoint with short TTL and SWR.
Ensure orchestrator publishes start/stop events to pub/sub and webhooks to an edge handler.
Implement surrogate-key tagging and purge paths in your CDN.
Pre-warm manifests and first segments on stream start.
Run a synthetic test that measures start->badge p95 across 10 POPs and tune until < 3s. Use templates from micro-event landing pages and test harnesses in micro-event landing playbooks.

Call to action

Live discovery is a competitive advantage. If your LIVE badges or cashtag-driven feeds are lagging, use the recipes above to reduce badge propagation to under 3 seconds and prevent origin stampedes. Start with a single-channel pilot: implement edge writes + surrogate-key purges and measure p95 propagation across POPs. Need a checklist or sample Worker/edge code to bootstrap your pilot? Reach out to cached.space for templates, or clone our reference repo to get a working end-to-end demo you can run in your CDN account.

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