September 2022 Summaries

Ably, a remote-first employer, has been recognized in the top ten of Flexa's SaaS and Development Software Flexible Working Industry Awards 2022 for its commitment to flexible working environments. The company allows employees to work from wherever they feel most comfortable and engaged, whether that be at home or in one of their offices in London or Boston. Ably has been recognized by Flexa for the second year running, highlighting the importance of employee choice when it comes to where and how they work. The company's flexible working practices allow everyone to participate and contribute to its success.

Ably, a company that began working remotely due to the Covid pandemic, has discovered that a remote-first approach is well suited and a key driver to their success. They have shared their remote-first guidelines and tips, emphasizing the importance of balancing asynchronous and synchronous communication. Asynchronous communication allows for efficient functioning on a large scale by leaving a trail of documentation and decisions that recipients can review when available. Tips for excelling at asynchronous communication include assuming low context, being clear when articulating ideas, organizing content, over-communication, and making sure synchronous work is impactful. The company also highlights the importance of choosing the right channels and tools for communication and collaboration. Through their experience as a remote-first company, Ably has learned valuable lessons and continues to iterate and grow its guidelines and resources.

Adobe has agreed to acquire Figma, a collaborative design tool, for $20 billion on September 15th. Figma is a browser-based platform that allows team members to work together in real-time on designs. The acquisition comes after rumors of Figma being considered by Microsoft. Adobe's high purchase price suggests they may utilize Figma's technology rather than shutting it down. This deal highlights the growing importance of shared, live collaborative experiences and the need for dependable infrastructure to support them.

Ably values diversity and strives for an inclusive environment where diverse voices are heard and made to belong. The company believes that embracing diversity leads to remarkable innovations, enhanced perspectives, and long-term success. They have implemented various practices such as using inclusive language in job descriptions, enhancing the hiring process, and providing training to interviewers to ensure fairness and inclusivity. Ably also offers a range of benefits and flexible working options to support their employees' diverse needs. The company is committed to continuous improvement in fostering diversity, inclusion, and belonging at Ably.

This blog post discusses Ably's journey in building the next iteration of their global network and the design decisions they faced. The company operates a global network spanning 8 AWS regions with hundreds of additional points-of-presences, providing unrivaled realtime messaging and data streaming performance, availability, and reliability. They decided to use VPC peering instead of Transit Gateway due to its cost-effectiveness and scalability. Multi-account support was achieved by creating a prod and nonprod VPC per region, with 3 public and private subnets per VPC each in a different availability zone. The company also chose to purchase a block of IPv6 space and will provision all VPCs and subnets as dual stack for easier routing between regions.

Ensuring an excellent user experience in realtime applications, such as live virtual events or collaborative tools, requires a robust and reliable core infrastructure that can handle unpredictable user behavior and network issues. Challenges like capacity planning, infrastructure performance, and managing intermittent network connections are critical, but they are not the whole story. Users now expect feature-rich experiences that enhance engagement, such as chat functionalities that include presence indicators, typing notifications, and emoji reactions. Ably, a serverless WebSockets platform, offers easy-to-use APIs to integrate these enriched features, allowing developers to build scalable and dependable realtime applications. Examples of applications built with Ably include live business intelligence dashboards, collaborative presentation tools, and live B2B chat solutions, showcasing the platform's versatility and scalability.

The WebSocket protocol is increasingly important for modern web applications as it enables real-time data handling with an event-driven architecture, propagating messages instantly to all connected clients. While dedicated WebSocket servers can be set up, serverless solutions are more scalable and cost-effective. AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda can be used to build a basic serverless WebSockets platform for simple applications like chat. However, this design has limitations at scale, such as connection state tracking, abrupt disconnection handling, lack of broadcasting support, and region restrictions. To overcome these challenges, third-party vendors like Ably offer serverless WebSocket platforms built for dependability and scalability, allowing developers to focus on core product innovation without managing realtime infrastructure.

This tutorial demonstrates how to build a simple e-commerce website using Fauna and Ably. The site features real-time updates on product availability, discounts, and user orders. Both Fauna and Ably are serverless solutions that provide scalability and ease of use. Fauna is a distributed document-relational database delivered as a global API, while Ably is a serverless pub/sub solution using real-time protocols such as WebSockets for seamless communication between devices. The integration of these two services allows for efficient data querying and storage, as well as real-time event distribution with minimal latencies.