December 2024 Summaries

There is an increasing demand for real-time data delivery as users expect faster experiences and instantaneous transactions. This requires not only lower latency per message but also the ability to handle far greater capacity in a globally-distributed manner. To address these requirements, WebSocket has become the dominant protocol for real-time web applications, offering persistent, fully-duplexed connections to achieve low latency requirements. Publish/Subscribe (pub/sub) has been around longer and enables providers to scale data transmission systems dynamically, which is crucial for providing new capacity needs. A simple pub/sub service can be built with WebSocket and Redis, but at scale, additional complexities such as message persistence, horizontal scaling, disaster recovery, and authentication need to be addressed. Ably provides a globally distributed pub/sub service that handles these difficulties, offering a comprehensive, managed Pub/Sub solution that allows developers to focus on their core application without the overhead of managing complex infrastructure.

Ably has partnered with MongoDB to provide a solution for device sync capabilities, introducing Ably LiveSync. This product enables seamless fan-out of MongoDB Atlas state to billions of clients in real-time, ensuring reliable and low-latency delivery of document data. The integration is designed to simplify the development process by handling complexities such as reconnections and data integrity without additional charges above standard platform use. Key benefits include limitless fan-out, connection state recovery, data integrity guarantees, and a low-cost consumption-based pricing model. Ably's proven real-time platform provides a high-performance experience with ultra-low latency, making it suitable for applications with global user bases.