October 2025 Summaries

An AWS outage on October 20, 2025, in the us-east-1 region highlighted the vulnerability of many services reliant on cloud providers, posing significant challenges for businesses aiming for resilience against regional failures. Ably, a platform designed for 100% uptime, demonstrated its robust architecture during this incident by employing multiple strategies for fault tolerance. These strategies include operating across multiple geographic regions with truly independent data centers, using active-active configurations for seamless traffic rerouting, and integrating multiple underlying service providers to avoid single points of failure. Ably also emphasizes continuous monitoring and smart client-side SDKs, which automatically detect and reroute around failures, ensuring users experience minimal impact during disruptions. The company's approach prioritizes designing systems to be resilient to infrastructure failures, rather than merely relying on service level agreements (SLAs) for compensation post-outage, proving reliability through infrastructure that users do not notice even in the event of failures.

During a recent AWS us-east-1 outage, Ably successfully maintained uninterrupted service due to its robust multi-region architecture, which ensured no customer impact and negligible latency increases. This architecture allows Ably's globally-distributed system to operate independently across multiple AWS regions, with traffic rerouted from the affected region to us-east-2 during the incident. Pre-existing connections in us-east-1 remained stable, and the latency impact was minimal, averaging a 3ms difference that was imperceptible to users. The incident demonstrated the effectiveness of Ably's architecture, which includes a multi-layered defense strategy enabling automatic client-side failover to maintain connectivity even in case of complete regional failure. The experience reinforced the importance of having a genuinely distributed system capable of isolating failures and highlighted the necessity of planning and practicing responses to such events to ensure real resilience.

Ably offers a range of resources and services to help developers build scalable and reliable real-time applications, including features like Pub/Sub annotations for adding meaningful context to messages and advice on choosing between long polling and WebSockets for real-time scalability. The company encourages users to connect with their technical team for support and offers a free plan that includes 6 million monthly messages, 200 concurrent channels, and 200 concurrent connections, all without requiring a credit card. For more detailed inquiries or to get started with their services, Ably provides contact options and promotes ease of access through their website.

Ably recently introduced several new features to enhance their Pub/Sub and Chat services, aiming to provide meaningful context and safer, cleaner chat experiences. Among these updates are annotations for Pub/Sub, new moderation providers for Ably Chat, React UI components for building chat interfaces quickly, and message reactions to enrich communication. These enhancements are designed to help users create scalable, reliable applications with WebSockets effortlessly. Ably offers a free forever plan that includes 6 million monthly messages, 200 concurrent channels, and 200 concurrent connections, all without requiring a credit card for signup.

Ably has introduced Annotations in its Pub/Sub platform, a feature designed to enhance realtime streams with structured, contextual data. Annotations allow users to add layers of information to messages, such as emojis, read receipts, and custom tags, making them versatile for applications like collaborative chat, IoT sensor streams, live trading data, and more. This feature offers flexibility with various annotation types, including total, distinct, unique, multiple, and flag, each providing different behaviors and use cases, such as tracking aggregate counts, enabling multiple reactions, or flagging messages for moderation. Annotations extend beyond chat, offering applications in live sports data, IoT, live trading streams, and logistics, turning data streams into interactive tools. To use annotations, developers need to enable the mutableMessages channel rule in the Ably Pub/Sub API, and the feature is currently supported in JavaScript, Cocoa, and Java SDKs, with plans for further expansion.