Like many other companies, Ably began working remotely because of the Covid pandemic. In time, we discovered that a remote-first approach is well suited and a key driver to our success. Remote-first makes the most sense to us, considering our mission and the goals we want to achieve. It has many perks, such as being able to hire diverse talent from all over the globe, as well as reaching more customers with our technology and product offering.

This blog post is the first in what we intend to be a series to detail Ably’s journey in building the next iteration of our global network. It focuses on the design and we will follow up with posts detailing the building, and finally migration from old to new. If you are interested in how you can network AWS accounts together on a global scale then read on! Ably operates a global network spanning 8 AWS regions with hundreds of additional points-of-presences.

To ensure a great user experience, whether that’s attending a live virtual event, chatting with friends or collaborating on a document, you need to ensure that the core realtime works in any situation and that you provide a feature-rich application. Disruption, downtime or lags result in poor realtime user experiences.

When building modern web applications, it is increasingly important to be able to handle realtime data with an event-driven architecture to propagate messages to all connected clients instantly. Several protocols are available, but WebSocket is arguably the most widely used as it is optimized for minimum overhead and low latency. The WebSocket protocol supports bidirectional, full-duplex communication between client and server over a persistent, single-socket connection.

As e-commerce has continued to mature, the level of service expected from consumers creates the need to build more reactive experiences. To meet those expectations, you’ll need a site that shows up-to-date information, with reliable displays of the latest product availability and discounts provided frictionlessly. We’ll be using Fauna and Ably to build this site.

Developers frequently choose Ably for building chat applications or to provide chat functionality in their products. While dev teams in different companies have different priorities, overall our customers tell us that using our serverless WebSockets platform frees them to fully focus on delivering the best possible core user experience. Just like our customers, we too like to keep our users happy.

Have you ever wanted to see the work of your entire engineering organization in a visualization as it happens? In this article, I'll tell you how I used Github webhooks and Netlify serverless functions, along with a simple Svelte web app, to do just this in my new interactive visualizer tool.

In this post, I compare two cloud pubsub services: Azure Web PubSub and Ably, to determine which provides the best development experience. The context will be a multi-user pixelart drawing application that I've built with both services. This is not a step-by-step instruction on how to build the entire application. I'll highlight some key features and differences. The GitHub repository for the app has further details and includes CodeTours to guide you through the solution.