January 2023 Summaries

The Ably Terraform provider simplifies the management of realtime architectures that include Ably through HashiCorp Terraform, a popular Infrastructure-as-Code tool. As realtime applications become increasingly important for companies, integrating their management into IaC tools is crucial. The partnership between Ably and HashiCorp allows users to automate the provisioning and management of realtime infrastructure using IaC through the new Terraform provider for Ably. This enables efficient handling of repetitive operations such as creating, configuring or deleting Ably apps, enumerating queues, creation of rules, and more. The Ably Terraform provider is built on top of the Ably Control API, allowing users to create and manage their Ably apps, API keys, namespaces, queues, integration rules, and more.

Realtime digital experiences are in high demand as they keep users engaged and entertained while allowing businesses to better serve their customers. Infrastructure is an essential component for delivering realtime experiences, including hardware, software, and network components. Businesses that provide fast, reliable realtime experiences can establish customer loyalty and gain a competitive advantage. However, building and maintaining realtime infrastructure requires significant time, resources, and expertise in computer science and distributed systems. Many businesses underestimate the costs and complexity of developing their own infrastructure, leading to missed deadlines, extended timelines, and high maintenance expenses. Offloading realtime infrastructure to a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider can save time, money, and resources while ensuring known scalability and reliability parameters.

Live chat has become a crucial tool for businesses to improve customer experience and satisfaction. It allows for faster response times, better engagement with customers, and increased sales and revenue. Many companies are using live chat creatively across various industries such as social messaging, customer engagement, livestream, and custom chat applications. Some examples include Super, Decathlon, Guru, HubSpot, Discount Mugs, Bank of America, DripShop, Reddit, WIZZO, AskFirst, and UCAS. To implement live chat, businesses can choose from building a system from scratch, using a Chat-as-a-Service (CaaS), or using a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Ably offers a flexible PaaS for realtime applications, including live chat experiences, with features such as Pub/Sub channels, emoji reactions, push notifications, authentication, and more.

Creating a live chat app requires careful consideration of features, communication protocols, and infrastructure decisions. Key foundations for successful chat or messaging apps include low latency data delivery, message delivery guarantees, scalability, elasticity, and reliability. Core chat features include authentication and authorization, access to contacts, messaging, and message storage. Enhanced chat features may involve edit/delete messages, complex text interpretation, file sharing, audio/video calling, push notifications, read receipts, presence indicators, message reactions, and app updates. The timeline and budget for a live chat app depend on various factors such as the features to be built, team size, funding, scaling and infrastructure costs, and post-launch maintenance and enhancements. Building realtime experiences is challenging and time-consuming, which is why many organizations opt for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers instead of building in-house. The choice between building chat infrastructure yourself or leveraging a PaaS depends on your specific needs and resources. Common challenges in building a realtime chat app include performance, reliability, scalability, cross-platform development, security and compliance, and capabilities to build rich chat features.

The demand for realtime digital experiences is growing rapidly as users increasingly expect immediate updates and interactions from their favorite apps and websites. To meet this expectation, businesses are focusing on incorporating realtime features into their digital products. Key capabilities needed to engineer realtime experiences include low-latency messaging, message ordering and delivery guarantees, message history/persistence, message interactions, presence, multi-protocol support, and robust security. Realtime use cases range from chat applications and data broadcasting to data synchronization, multiplayer collaboration, notifications, and location tracking. Businesses can choose between building and managing realtime infrastructure in-house or offloading this responsibility to a specialized provider like Ably, which offers versatile APIs for developing powerful realtime apps at scale.