Realtime is now a core user expectation. Whether you’re enabling online communities through realtime chat or creating shared workspaces for remote collaboration, a near instantaneous flow of data forms the backbone of modern software engineering. As such, most organizations have already had a discussion around whether to buy realtime infrastructure or to build it in-house.

CRDTs can sometimes be talked about as complex data structures that you use with CRDT libraries. And they can be that, but they don't have to be. Some of the natural solutions that any software engineer might come up to solve a problem in a distributed system are CRDTs, even though the implementer might not know or care that they are. It can be useful to identify label them as such.

Customer experience is changing. Research from Merkle shows that customer loyalty increasingly relies on an emotional connection, with frictionless interactions a core requirement. This means that the days of strictly regimented, one-off customer contacts are over. Instead, customers today expect an ongoing relationship with the brands they trust. Done well, live chat can be the ideal way to provide that ongoing connection.

Build vs buy conversations often start with cost. Specifically, “Can we build and maintain this in-house for less than a vendor wants to charge?” And that’s a pretty good opener. In fact, we’ll tackle that in the next post in this series. But as we saw in our previous installment, building your own realtime experience infrastructure is complex. Comparing costs makes little sense if you haven’t already considered the risk that this complexity brings.

With more than a billion players worldwide, online games are a significant cultural, social, and economic phenomenon. And while innovative gameplay gets people through the door, it’s the social aspect of online gaming that keeps them playing. That puts social functionality front and center when it comes to the difference between an ongoing hit and an expensive flash in the pan. And players are quite particular about how they want to engage with others.