The Realtime API Family

As the demand for real-time data grows, with predictions that by 2025 a third of global data will be real-time, the terminology surrounding real-time APIs remains inconsistent and fragmented. The terms real-time, event-driven, streaming, pub/sub, and push APIs are often used interchangeably, despite representing distinct concepts. Ably, a provider of cloud infrastructure and APIs, has introduced the umbrella term "Realtime API Family" to encompass these various API types, emphasizing their role in delivering data from producers to consumers as quickly as possible. Each type, such as streaming APIs that focus on data integrity and message ordering, pub/sub APIs that handle messaging through topics, push APIs for upstream data delivery, and event-driven APIs that react to events in real-time, contributes to the broader goal of achieving real-time functionality. While the ecosystem matures and seeks standardized terminology, Ably's framework helps simplify the complexity involved in real-time engineering for developers and organizations aiming to build scalable, dependable real-time applications.

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