At Ably, we believe that embracing diversity is fundamental to our success as a company. In line with our open for all and technology needs humanity values, we strive for an open and honest environment where diverse voices are heard and made to belong. We aim to create a place where people can show up as their whole selves each day and contribute to the best of their ability. It’s important we create a space that represents all the wonderful people of the world, including our customers, who can express themselves and share opinions and ideas that lead to a fantastic community and innovation ..read more

Introduction This blog post is the first in what we intend to be a series to detail Ably’s journey in building the next iteration of our global network. It focuses on the design and we will follow up with posts detailing the building, and finally migration from old to new. If you are interested in how you can network AWS accounts together on a global scale then read on! Ably operates a global network spanning 8 AWS regions with hundreds of additional points-of-presences. This provides our customers with unrivaled realtime messaging and data streaming performance, availability, and reliability ..read more

Have you ever wanted to see the work of your entire engineering organization in a visualization as it happens? In this article, I'll tell you how I used Github webhooks and Netlify serverless functions, along with a simple Svelte web app, to do just this in my new interactive visualizer tool. Graphical visualizations are a fun way to see progress and to help your organizations to understand that, while tech work can sometimes seem invisible, the amount of effort involved in building software is a huge team endeavour! In the early 2000s, a tool was built that could visualize your software ver ..read more

Introduction Data travels at the speed of light, which we cannot control (yet), so when you contact a server, the greater the distance from your location, the slower the network performance. Cloud providers like AWS locate their physical infrastructure worldwide to provide global coverage. Currently, AWS offers 26 regions, including North America, South America, Europe, China, Asia Pacific, South Africa, and the Middle East.  Splitting the cloud into regions helps AWS maintain availability and reliability by keeping services self-contained and isolated. Each region is further comprised o ..read more

There’s unprecedented demand for multiplayer products. That is, products with features that support realtime, shared live and collaborative experiences between users. There’s been explosive growth in the unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) sector through the pandemic, but collaboration isn’t just about the Zooms and Slacks of the world. Remote-first and hybrid workplaces are increasingly common and have fueled growth in apps that provide a shared live experience for project collaborations where users are not physically co-located. Taking an application that’s designed to be si ..read more

This article explains how Ably complements Kafka to reach end-users on the public internet. Introducing Kafka Kafka is a widely adopted open-source event streaming solution to capture, store and process event data. It uses the publish and subscribe (or pub/sub) pattern and acts as a broker to enable asynchronous event-driven communication between software components. Kafka is popular for building high-performance, event-driven pipelines due to its scalability, delivery guarantee, node failure management, high availability, and fault tolerance. Let's now briefly summarize Kafka's key concepts ..read more

When it comes to the apps we rely on everyday for chatting with family, checking how close our delivery is, and collaborating with colleagues in a shared whiteboard, we expect seamless realtime experiences without delays or downtime. Ably surveyed over 500 engineering leaders about the challenges of building realtime edge messaging infrastructure in-house to power these shared live experiences. We gained first-hand insight into the number of developers needed, time to market, cost, and scale issues when it comes to building edge messaging infrastructure in-house versus outsourcing to a Platfo ..read more

Computing advances have taken us full circle. From terminals and a mainframe to individual personal computers, to cloud-based centralization again. Today, the devices we carry with us exceed the power of those original mainframes. They connect and inform us with a range of responsive, live experiences. Where would we be without live sports scores, online chat, order-delivery tracking, or synchronized document collaboration? These applications typically use an event-driven architecture to distribute events in near realtime. The speed of light is not something we can overcome (yet), and it nega ..read more

The Ably Kafka Connector has a raft of new enhancements, and is now available in a full general availability (GA) release. Developers now have the option to use pattern-based mapping rules to enable streaming of data from many Kafka topics to many Ably channels - ideal for chat solutions, live sports updates, live streaming, broadcasting notifications and alerts. This new feature presents greater flexibility, whilst further easing the management of extending Kafka-based pipelines to end users, over the public internet. Fine grain Kafka Topics into multiple Ably channelsHow to extend Kafka pip ..read more

Extending Kafka data to millions of concurrently-connected client devices in realtime Here at Ably, we're excited to announce our participation and Silver sponsorship of the Kafka Summit 2022, taking place between 25-26 April. The Kafka Summit is the only dedicated technical conference for the Apache Kafka® Community, and it's a great opportunity for anyone building large-scale event-driven systems to learn and share ideas. It's also the perfect event for us to launch the general availability of the Ably Kafka Connector. Ably are proud to be Silver sponsors of this year's Kafka Summit London ..read more