February 2022 Summaries

WebTransport is a new specification that could offer an alternative to WebSockets for applications requiring low-latency, event-driven communication between endpoints. Unlike WebSockets, which creates a single stream per connection, WebTransport allows multiple streams over a single connection and works with HTTP/3, the upcoming version of the transport protocol used by the World Wide Web. It uses both reliable and unreliable data transfer methods, making it suitable for various use cases such as bidirectional data streaming for multiplayer gaming, interactive live streams, and data transfer for sensors and internet of things devices.

Audience engagement is a crucial aspect of virtual events and online platforms, enabling participants to interact in real-time through features such as chat, Q&A sessions, polls, quizzes, and leaderboards. Realtime updates are essential for audience engagement, with technology built on event-driven architecture using the publish and subscribe pattern. Key technical challenges include ensuring message integrity, minimizing latency, maintaining availability, and achieving fault tolerance. To build a dependable realtime solution for audience engagement, it is often more cost-effective to partner with a third-party vendor like Ably, which offers scalable infrastructure and abstraction of the complexities involved in building such systems.

Sports betting is rapidly growing in the US as more states legalize online and mobile sports betting. The industry has seen a 20-fold increase since 2018, with Super Bowl being the most significant event for betting providers. In 2021, over $4.3 billion was wagered on Super Bowl 55 by more than 23 million Americans. However, service outages and poor app performance during major events have raised concerns about the industry's capacity to handle increased demand. As sportsbooks invest in front-end technology, they need to focus on reliable back-end platforms to ensure a seamless user experience. A serverless cloud-based architecture can provide dependable infrastructure with elasticity and fault tolerance, ensuring high availability, low latency, and data integrity guarantees during major sporting events.

The Ably Control API GitHub Action enables developers to create Ably applications and API keys directly from their GitHub workflow, ensuring a reliable and repeatable process of creating cloud infrastructure. This is particularly useful in the context of DevOps, where software development teams are responsible for managing their applications and cloud infrastructure using continuous integration & delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Automation provides benefits such as a repeatable process, reduced human error, and shorter delivery cycle times. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important aspect of automating cloud infrastructure management, with GitHub Workflows and Actions offering CI/CD capabilities to deploy applications wherever they are hosted. The Ably Control API Action can be customized according to specific needs and provides a secure way to handle sensitive values such as IDs and keys.