At Ably we provide a service that handles high volumes of client connections – multiple millions of concurrent WebSocket and HTTP streaming connections. Said connections are terminated by a set of frontend compute instances; distributing the connections among available instances is the role of one or more load balancers.

This article explores Socket.IO v4, assessing some of the more important updates compared with v3 – the improvements they offer, and how to migrate.

With demand for realtime data growing by the day, more and more organizations are embracing event-driven architectures powered by event streaming & stream processing technologies. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some of the most popular stream processing platforms, analyzing their strengths and shortcomings.

It’s been almost a year since I wrote about using Keboola Connection in Keboola. A lot of things have happened since then: my Bloodborne board game finally arrived, I'm a double uncle… oh, and I got engaged. I also celebrated another anniversary this month - seven years of working at Keboola! And I believe that we’ve made some great progress yet again. Last time, I gave somewhat of an intro to our internal reporting.

If you’ve ever used Go before, the concepts of Publish/Subscribe should be fairly familiar to you. It is much like how goroutines communicate over channels between each other, the idea boils down to allowing for such a channel to have multiple ‘subscribers’ receive messages sent on the channel. This paradigm can be powerful when used right, allowing for a cut down of complexity from both the publisher and subscriber side, as well as fast asynchronous communication.

When I joined Ably we were a team of 13 people in an office in Camden. We weren’t long off the back of securing our Series A round, we knew lots of hiring was coming, and we needed to grow up (a bit). The culture was easily absorbed by osmosis: very welcoming, smart people, like to have a pint in the Hawley Arms. No set working hours. Lots of dogs! It’s bewildering to think how much can change in that time.

Today, we’re pleased to support Flutter’s growing community of builders by releasing Ably’s Flutter plugin v1.0. This makes it easy for developers to add WebSocket-based pub/sub messaging to their Flutter applications. Flutter has grown incredibly over the past few years, providing a platform to build modern applications. Increasingly, developers are looking to build event-driven applications where user interactions play out in realtime.

In this article, we'll see how to use Airtable to store realtime messages using a group chat app as an example. We'll use Ably's realtime infrastructure to power the chat app and make use of WebHooks to publish messages to Airtable directly in the correct order from Ably. Check the full source code of the group chat app written in VueJS on GitHub and the live demo of the application at https://realtime-chat-storage.ably.dev/

Exactly-once is a desirable (if not critical) message delivery guarantee and a remarkably complex engineering challenge to solve. In this blog post, we will look at what exactly-once means in the context of distributed pub/sub systems, and the exactly-once guarantees that the Ably realtime pub/sub messaging platform provides. Ably often acts as the broker in data streaming pipelines: publishers send messages to our platform, and we deliver these messages to subscribers.