Our everyday digital experiences are in the midst of a revolution. Customers increasingly expect their online experiences to be interactive, immersive, and realtime by default. The need to satisfy user expectations is driving the exponential growth of event-driven architectures in organizations of all shapes and sizes. And by enabling users to have realtime experiences whenever and wherever they want, 24/7, mobile drives this change further and faster.

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.

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?

A recent GartnerⓇ report recognizes Ably as playing a critical role in powering meaningful online experiences by extending event-driven architectures to the edge. Within the spectrum of event-driven architecture use cases, Ably reaches end-user devices with last-mile connectivity: it’s at the heart of what we do. Ably is edge messaging!

We're excited to announce the Ably VS Code extension! With this extension you can manage your Ably applications directly from VS Code.

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.

At its most simple, user presence represents a user’s online or offline status and is typically used to show whether a user is available, for example, on a chat system. Here are some other examples of where it’s used: Presence is a key feature of live apps and services and a primary element of the user experience in audience engagement. It is a great way to build a sense of immediacy between participants; knowing who else is online builds a sense of inclusion and interaction.

Ably is a distributed pub/sub edge messaging platform that acts as the broker in realtime data streaming pipelines. Publishers send messages to Ably, and we deliver those messages to subscribers. We guarantee: In this article, we describe how Ably can make such guarantees in the face of network outages. We cover the redundancy built into our server clusters and the design we have used to ensure message ordering and exactly-once delivery.

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 provides an edge messaging service to deliver data at low latency and power live and collaborative applications on millions of simultaneously connected devices. Our platform runs tens of millions of concurrent, long-running WebSocket and HTTP streaming connections and reaches more than 300 million devices across 80 countries each month. Ably is on track to power realtime digital experiences for one billion devices per month by 2024.