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.
WebRTC (Web Real-time Communication) is an industry effort to enhance the web browsing model. It allows browsers to directly exchange realtime media with other browsers in a peer-to-peer fashion through secure access to input peripherals like webcams and microphones. Traditional web architecture is based on the client-server paradigm, where a client sends an HTTP request to a server and gets a response containing the information requested. In contrast, WebRTC allows the exchange of data among N peers.
The timeline of commercial computing can be roughly summarized as: buying computers → renting computers → renting partial computers (virtual servers) → renting partial computers for very short periods (cloud computing).
If you are a Kotlin developer, there is a high chance you already know that coroutines are the new way of composing your asynchronous, concurrent and parallel workflows. It is also the recommended solution by Google to use for asynchronous programming in Android. In this blog post I will discuss the importance of asynchronous architecture. I will also explain how I combined Ably and Kotlin coroutines to develop a multiplayer game room SDK.
With the rise of cloud-based and distributed systems, messaging solutions appear to be everywhere. Rather than direct client-server communication, messaging and event-driven architecture allow loosely coupled components to communicate with each other and results in better scalability of the system.
A few weeks ago I saw this message in our internal support channel on Slack, and it made my gears grind. So I stopped to take a look, since the last thing we want is a customer taken advantage of. There are people out there on the internet cheeky enough to freeload off your account, and use up your monthly quotas. What's more: you may not know that it is happening.
