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.

The Ably Terraform provider greatly simplifies the provisioning and managing of realtime architectures that include Ably via HashiCorp Terraform. Our growing reliance on realtime applications is highlighted both by the impact of incidents such as WhatApp’s latest outage, and by an exponential growth in use cases for realtime technology. This growth is spurred on by the fast adoption of dynamically orchestrated, microservice-oriented cloud architectures.

WebSockets and Server-Sent Events are commonly used in realtime applications where quick and efficient data transfer is a critical requirement. The expectations of realtime experiences in applications has only grown with time, with improving technology and understanding of what is possible. This article compares two popular realtime protocols — the WebSockets and Server-Sent Event APIs. Below you’ll learn what each is capable of, their pros and cons, and when to use them.

Realtime digital experiences are in high demand. They keep users engaged, informed, and entertained in a fast-paced digital world, and they allow businesses to better serve their customers, provide more efficient and effective services, and gain the upper hand over competitors. This is the second post in a series that looks at what it takes to build and deliver realtime experiences for end-users.

Imagine you’re running a logistics business. Your asset tracking stops working, and the only way for customers to get in touch is via email or phone. As calls and emails pile in, your support team becomes stretched - and customers become frustrated as they have to wait to have their calls taken and emails answered. Now imagine if instead the customer who first experienced the issue could have accessed a live chat service, and easily let your customer service team know what was going on.

We all expect online experiences to happen in realtime. Messages should arrive instantly, dashboards should deliver business metrics as they happen, and live sports scores should broadcast to fans around the world in a blink. This expectation is even higher for chat, which is now embedded in everything from e-commerce platforms to online gaming. But building realtime chat requires some heavy lifting—especially if you’re starting from scratch.