April 2022 Summaries

The Ably Kafka Connector has been released in a full general availability version with new enhancements. Developers can now use pattern-based mapping rules for streaming data from multiple Kafka topics to multiple Ably channels, suitable for chat solutions, live sports updates, live streaming, broadcasting notifications and alerts. This feature provides greater flexibility while easing the management of extending Kafka-based pipelines to end users over the public internet. The Ably Kafka Connector is a sink connector that allows publishing messages from Kafka topics to Ably channels, with support for static and pattern-based mapping options. Pattern-based mapping enables mapping multiple Kafka topics directly into any number of Ably channels, ideal for multi-tenanted chat solutions or other use cases requiring streaming data across multiple channels.

Ably, a company with over 130 employees in the UK, Europe, and US, has significantly upgraded its employee benefits package after raising Series B funding. The new offerings focus on health & wellbeing and supporting employees' futures. Key improvements include private medical insurance, cash plan, increased holiday allowance, cycle scheme, technology loans, pension schemes, life assurance, income protection, and financial wellbeing coaching. These enhancements align with Ably's values of openness and inclusivity while ensuring employee satisfaction and retention.

User presence represents a user's online or offline status and is used in various applications such as chat systems, audience engagement platforms, medical apps, education software, and online collaboration tools. It helps build a sense of immediacy between participants by indicating who else is online and can be customized to display the user's status. Ably, an event-driven system that uses pub/sub messaging, offers feature-complete messaging, including presence features. However, as the number of people subscribed to a presence set increases, there is quadratic growth in presence messages sent, which can lead to high costs and message limits. To prevent this, Ably imposes a limit on the number of clients that can enter the presence set of any channel.

Ably is a distributed pub/sub edge messaging platform that ensures fault tolerance and superior messaging quality-of-service through four pillars of dependability. It provides regional and global fault tolerance, ensuring message availability and survivability even during network outages. The platform uses redundancy built into server clusters and design to ensure message ordering and exactly-once delivery. Ably also enables publishers and subscribers to recover gracefully following network disconnection.

Ably is participating as a Silver sponsor in the Kafka Summit 2022 taking place on April 25-26, where they will announce the general availability of their Kafka Connector. The Ably Kafka Connector enables companies to quickly and easily move data from Kafka topics to Ably channels, allowing for realtime extension of Kafka data to millions of concurrent client devices. This solution is designed for event streaming over the public internet and can be used with any Kafka deployment that includes Kafka Connect.

Ably is a messaging service provider that delivers data at low latency and powers live applications on millions of connected devices. The platform runs tens of millions of concurrent WebSocket and HTTP streaming connections, reaching over 300 million devices across 80 countries each month. It aims to power realtime digital experiences for one billion devices per month by 2024. Ably's customers include platforms for participative online events, collaborative working, and realtime sports data distribution. The company has migrated its core systems to Graviton2 instances in all production clusters, resulting in reduced overhead costs and a positive environmental impact due to lower power consumption and heat generation.