Database-driven realtime architectures are becoming more and more common as evidenced by key backers and widespread use of software like Firebase and Supabase. The two key priorities for an app following database-driven realtime messaging are long-term storage and change data capture (CDC) updates from the database. In this two part article series, we’ll take a detailed look at a fully serverless chat app where you can edit previously published messages.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we walked through how to bypass Ably’s SDKs and connect to Ably’s backend using websocat, where every JSON message has to be typed out by hand. In this second part, we’ll fix that tedious bit by switching to NodeJS, and we’ll continue our process of building our own minimal Ably (NodeJS) SDK.

Built by our long-time community expert Apoorv Vardhan, the Ably-Postgres connector can listen to changes in a Postgres table and publish realtime messages on Ably channels whenever a change occurs. The connector enables building database-driven realtime applications where long-term storage and update triggers from previously published messages are essential. One such example is an editable chat app, which we’ll talk about later in this article.

Ably is an enterprise-grade pub/sub messaging platform with a suite of integrated services to deliver realtime experiences like interactive learning, logistics GPS tracking, and live sports updates.

The global increase of realtime data is spurred on by the steady rise of user demand for realtime digital experiences - from virtual events, news, and financial information to IoT devices. The Ably platform has been providing realtime infrastructure for over 5 years now , and we’ve seen, and helped, the demand increase first-hand. A few years ago, our customers only had realtime requirements for one or two specific features, usually around firing updates and notifications.

This blog post tells the story of why and how we migrated from the Node Redis client library to Ioredis.

Presenting the Ably Periodic Table of Realtime putting in a single place all the disparate, well, elements of the realtime and event-driven space. Users increasingly demand realtime, synchronous digital experiences. This demand is growing exponentially and presents serious engineering challenges. Event-driven architectures meet the challenge head-on, filling the requirements gap, and establishing themselves as an indispensable, integral part of the solution.

It’s fairly common to want to have a server running a process, be it a website, a calculation, or anything else you can imagine. Often outside of the device’s core functionality though, there are many other things you may be interested in. Information on if the process is still running, what server(s) are running, what errors are occurring in the process, and general information being available externally are common examples of this.

DevOps engineers working on fast-scaling software architectures that include Ably now have it a bit easier with Control API. This new feature allows you to increase your testing capability and to configure complex production systems quickly and safely, directly from your configuration and orchestration tools.

At Ably, we run a large scale production infrastructure that powers our customers’ real-time messaging applications around the world. Like in most tech companies, this infrastructure is largely software-based; also like in most tech companies, much of that software is deployed and runs in Docker containers.