June 2018 Summaries

Ably Realtime, a distributed pub/sub messaging platform, has realized significant performance improvements and cost savings by upgrading its core routing and front-end layers from Node.js v6 to v8, taking advantage of enhancements in Google's V8 JavaScript engine. This upgrade has led to more consistent performance under load, reduced server costs by approximately 40%, and demonstrated the value of selecting technologies backed by strong community support and continuous performance optimization, such as gRPC, Cassandra, and Golang. Despite some initial hesitation due to the need for stability and 100% uptime, the gradual and careful adoption of Node.js v8 has proven beneficial, underscoring the strategic decision to invest in well-supported open-source projects. This approach allows Ably to focus on revenue growth while still benefiting from performance improvements without significant engineering efforts.

Consistent hashing is a technique used in distributed systems to distribute data across multiple nodes while minimizing the impact of changes in node availability. It involves representing requests and server nodes as points on a virtual ring, with each request being served by the closest node in a clockwise direction. This approach ensures that only a portion of the requests will be affected by a given change in the cluster size, making it more efficient than classic hashing methods. Consistent hashing is used in various distributed systems, such as Amazon's Dynamo storage system and Riak key-value database, to balance load evenly across nodes and minimize the need for data redistribution when nodes are added or removed.

Matthew O'Riordan, CEO of Ably Realtime, discusses the history and evolution of web technologies, focusing on data in motion versus data at rest. He highlights how real-time functionality has become increasingly important due to consumer demand for real-time experiences and exponential growth in data generated from new sources like IoT devices and machine learning. O'Riordan emphasizes that while the internet has made significant progress, it is still primarily focused on data at rest rather than data in motion. He also discusses how businesses can benefit from real-time APIs to share data freely, easily, and without significant engineering overhead. Finally, he offers advice for developers looking to incorporate real-time functionality into their applications and participate in the real-time data supply chain.

Realtime connectivity is crucial for digital publishers to keep readers engaged and enhance user experience through live features such as live commenting. Live commenting can be made available using either a push or polling data approach. Facebook's "write locally, read globally" solution allows efficient real-time updates by storing information about the content piece that a user is currently viewing in their local data center and fetching viewer info once a new comment has been published across various data centers. Real-time communication platforms like Snapchat have brought a sense of urgency to reacting to specific content within a certain timeframe, setting high expectations for real-time experiences. To add live commenting features to applications, organizations can use real-time data delivery platforms like Ably and follow tutorials on building real-time commenting systems with React.