June 2021 Summaries

Ably has secured $70 million in Series B funding co-led by Insight Partners and Dawn Capital LLP, following its $7 million Series A round in 2020. The company aims to become the definitive infrastructure of the internet and is on track to reach one billion devices by 2023, two years ahead of schedule. Ably's platform powers synchronized digital experiences in realtime for various organizations, including HubSpot. With this investment, Ably plans to accelerate its focus on solving next-level realtime problems related to data synchronization at scale and continue building the platform to power synchronized digital experiences in realtime beyond 2023.

Ably, a platform that powers synchronized digital experiences in realtime, has secured $70 million in its Series B funding round co-led by Insight Partners and Dawn Capital LLP. The investment will support the company's growth and continued platform innovation to provide organizations with a comprehensive solution for offloading the complexity of realtime data synchronization at scale for distributed applications, devices, and hybrid cloud environments. Ably currently reaches 250 million devices per month and serves 500 customers across 80 countries.

The Fallacies of Distributed Computing are a set of eight assumptions that can lead to failure in distributed systems. These fallacies include the belief that the network is reliable, latency is zero, bandwidth is infinite, the network is secure, topology doesn't change, there is one administrator, transport cost is zero, and the network is homogeneous. Understanding these fallacies can help architects and developers build dependable distributed systems by expecting and preparing for their opposite conditions.

This tutorial demonstrates how to create a reliable event streaming structure using Redis and Ably in Go programming language. The main components of the system include a trading server, which generates data on trades; a Redis container, which holds messages from the trading server; and an Ably publishing server, which consumes messages from Redis whenever it can publish to Ably. Clients are subscribed to the Ably channel that the Publisher publishes to and displays the information. The stack also includes Docker for creating Images and Kubernetes for managing a collection of Docker Containers.

Databases and event-driven architectures are essential for organizing information efficiently. Realtime databases combine storage and realtime features, but they may struggle with scaling and modularity. To achieve high cohesion and loose coupling in large applications, it is crucial to decouple realtime concerns from storage concerns. Developers should evaluate their requirements and choose the right tools for each job, such as a dedicated database solution and a scalable realtime component. Modularity ensures that systems can be scaled independently, providing better performance and user experience at scale.

Webhooks are a popular method for integrating various business applications, but they can create challenges when scaling. As the number of event occurrences increases, webhook architectures must also be scalable. However, not all applications are built to scale, and sudden increases in traffic can overwhelm systems if not provisioned for scaling in advance. Ably's Incoming Webhooks feature allows users to receive messages from third-party integrations without worrying about bottlenecks or overwhelming their endpoints. The platform handles buffering and load balancing as webhook traffic scales, allowing for queuing and consuming high volumes of realtime messages in bulk. This makes it easier to manage data processing pipelines and maintain seamless integration between various applications. To use Incoming Webhooks, users need to configure the external web service with a webhook URL that specifies the endpoint for generated webhook requests. Ably's dashboard allows users to create incoming webhooks with friendly names and channels for publishing messages. This generates a URL to be used in other systems' webhooks as the callback URL. In summary, Incoming Webhooks by Ably simplify integration between various applications while handling scaling challenges, making it easier to develop dependable realtime apps.

This tutorial guides you through building a simple web app that receives and displays SMS votes in real time using Ably's Pub/Sub messaging service, Vonage Communications APIs, and Next.js framework. The app allows users to vote by sending an SMS message to a specific number, with the results displayed on a bar chart. The tutorial covers setting up accounts for Ably, Vercel, and Vonage, creating a serverless function to authenticate with Ably, building React components for the question and results display, receiving SMS messages using Vonage, and hosting the app on Vercel.

The Jamstack is a modern approach to building websites that focuses on pre-rendering and statically generating sites for improved performance, security, and scalability. It involves using JavaScript, APIs, and Markup (JAM) to create dynamic content without relying on traditional server-side rendering. This article explores the concept of Jamstack and demonstrates how it can be used to build a realtime synced streaming application called a live watch party app. The app allows users to watch a video synchronously with friends while chatting alongside, similar to Netflix's watch party feature. The tech stack for this watch party app includes Nuxt.js, Strapi, Ably, and Netlify. Nuxt.js is a web framework based on Vue.js that enables the creation of server-side rendered or static websites. Strapi is an open-source headless CMS used to manage video content in this project. Ably is a realtime messaging infrastructure service that provides low-latency messaging, high reliability, and global scalability. Netlify is a cloud hosting company known for popularizing the Jamstack approach by offering hosting and serverless backend services for web applications and static sites. The watch party app's architecture involves serving statically generated websites directly from a CDN (Content Delivery Network) without needing an origin server. Although the initial site that's loaded from the CDN is static, containing pre-rendered assets and data, dynamic content can be retrieved via API calls to external servers or APIs. This results in improved performance and better user and developer experience. The watch party app uses Ably's Pub/Sub platform for realtime messaging, which allows different components of the app to communicate with each other seamlessly. The app also utilizes VueX store, a central store for most of the data in the static site, making it easier to manage and update state variables across various components. In conclusion, Jamstack can effectively handle dynamic content and is a great concept when applied correctly. By leveraging modern technologies like Nuxt.js, Strapi, Ably, and Netlify, developers can create powerful realtime applications with enhanced performance, security, and scalability.