November 2021 Summaries

Ably, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider, emphasizes the importance of optimizing on-call processes to enhance service reliability and employee well-being. Key strategies include treating alerts like code, which ensures consistency and quality through code reviews, and using percentile-based metrics over averages for more precise alert signals. The company employs Prometheus Alertmanager to manage alerts efficiently, using features like deduplication and routing, while Karma enhances alert visibility. PagerBeauty is used to clearly communicate on-call responsibilities, and regular automated tests confirm the alert pipeline's functionality. An incident management framework improves response organization and confidence, reducing errors and forgotten actions. These practices not only boost employee morale but also improve customer service by enabling swift and effective incident resolution. Ably's robust infrastructure supports massive scale with minimal latency, ensuring high availability even during multiple infrastructure failures.

Livestreams have gained immense popularity since 2020 as people come together for live sports and arts events, work, learn, and play. The interactive elements of livestreams, such as chat, emoji reactions, quizzes, leaderboards, and polls, allow viewers to engage with each other and the host. Twitch is a popular platform among gamers who stream their gameplay and webcam feed for others to watch and interact in real-time. The scale of live audiences has surpassed traditional TV networks, as seen during the 2019 League of Legends World Championship which had over 100 million viewers compared to the Super Bowl's 92 million TV viewers. Brands are leveraging livestream audience interaction to get closer to their customers and gather real-time feedback. The value of China's livestream e-commerce market grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 280 percent between 2017 and 2020, reaching an estimated $171 billion in 2020. Consumers appreciate the opportunity to interact with brands during livestreams, share their opinions, and feel included. Event-driven architecture is crucial for audience engagement as it supports instantaneous communication and real-time data exchange. The publish and subscribe (pub/sub) pattern is common in event-driven systems, allowing event producers to send messages when a state change occurs and event subscribers to consume them. This pattern supports audience engagement's main features, such as changes to presence information and delivery of chat messages. Audience sizes can vary significantly during events, making it essential for an audience engagement platform to be elastic and able to handle sudden large numbers of attendees. The non-blocking nature of a pub/sub pattern allows it to scale as needed with suitable infrastructure underpinning it. Presence information keeps track of each audience member, while chat messages are distributed in real-time using the pub/sub pattern. As companies innovate to meet users' expectations for online engagement, they embark on a real-time journey. Engineering a real-time event-driven architecture requires deep knowledge and expertise, making outsourcing the responsibility for real-time communication an attractive option. Ably offers an enterprise-ready edge messaging platform with cloud-based pub/sub messaging at its core, handling scale, latency, data durability, integrity, storage, seamless connection recovery, device interoperability, network outages, encryption, security, and authentication.

Ably was the delegate sponsor at GopherCon UK 2021 held in London. The conference featured keynotes and talks on various topics related to Go programming language, including distributed face-recognition running on Kubernetes, instrumenting Go applications with Open Telemetry, and optimizing Go for clouds. Ably team members attended the event for learning and development purposes as well as to represent Ably and help run a hackathon. The overall winner of the hackathon was Ably Text, which used Ably's API to broadcast tweet counts in real-time.

Ably is developing a comprehensive guide to building a fully-featured, scalable chat application, addressing the complexities and challenges that developers face, such as authentication, message storage, and user roles. Their approach leverages a tech stack that includes React for the frontend, Azure Functions for the backend, CosmosDB for data storage, and Auth0 for authentication. The guide aims to help developers integrate core chat functionalities, like chat rooms and message editing, as well as advanced features such as commands, notifications, and media sharing, ensuring that the chat application can handle large-scale user interactions. Through a series of blog posts, Ably plans to demonstrate best practices and provide code on GitHub, inviting feedback from the community to ensure the guide remains beneficial and relevant for those building chat applications.

The Control API is a new feature from Ably that enables users to manage configurations programmatically. It has been designed with dependability in mind, adhering to four pillars of reliability: Performance, Integrity, Reliability, and Availability. To ensure its robustness under heavy load, the Control API was subjected to rigorous load testing using Apache JMeter and Locust. The tests aimed to simulate realistic usage patterns from various types of users, including typical, power, bad, and bot users. Rate-limiting issues were addressed by using Squid proxy to forward requests from different IPs. Resources for managing the load testing system were closely monitored to prevent excessive costs. Overall, the Control API's performance under heavy load was satisfactory, providing confidence in its ability to handle real-world usage scenarios.

React is the most commonly used web framework for building single-page apps and high fidelity frontends. Traditionally, state management in React involves binding components to a state passed between them using "props". However, this can cause problems when combined with code that implements its own state management. To address these issues, Ably has built an Ably React Hooks npm package to simplify the process of using Ably with React. The package provides custom React Hooks for managing state and subscribing to channels in functional components. It also supports all parameter combinations of a regular call to channel.subscribe, allowing developers to filter messages by message type.

Ably, a remote-first company, has recently updated its parental leave policy to be more inclusive and generous. The new policy offers equal leave for primary and secondary caregivers, regardless of gender or family composition. It also provides compassionate support for employees facing loss during pregnancy or adoption. By working with external consultants and benchmarking against leading companies' policies, Ably aims to create a supportive work environment that values its employees' well-being and encourages diversity. The company is currently growing and actively recruiting new talent while continuing to improve its policies and foster an inclusive culture.