Today I’m absolutely thrilled to announce Ably’s $70M Series B co-led by Insight Partners and Dawn Capital LLP. We’ve grown immensely since I shared details of Ably’s Series A funding in 2020. Back then we reached 50 million devices per month. Our mission is to become the definitive infrastructure of the internet, so we set ourselves the goal of reaching one billion devices by 2025, which felt like an insurmountable challenge at the time.
The fallacies of distributed computing are a list of 8 statements describing false assumptions that architects and developers involved with distributed systems might make (but should undoubtedly steer away from). In this blog post, we’ll look at what these fallacies are, how they came to be, and how to navigate them in order to engineer dependable distributed systems.
A common problem that our customers have is event streaming spikey traffic to their clients. For example, imagine a server which needs to stream details on cryptocurrency trades. The quantity of trades happening each second is likely to fluctuate, sometimes nothing could happen, other times perhaps thousands. In order to ensure reliable communication, it’s important that rate limits are in place on how many messages are to be sent to subscribed clients.
Databases are one of the most useful and foundational constructs in computing. They are what allows us to take our exponentially growing amounts of information and to organize it according to efficient, logical patterns of information architecture.
Webhooks are the easiest way to integrate your various business applications, but they can create challenges and complexity when you are scaling. If you’re an Ably user, you don’t have to worry about this. What’s more, with ‘Incoming Webhooks’ it is now easier than ever to receive messages from a 3rd party integration, with no risk of bottlenecks when you’re rapidly scaling.
Allow me to set a scene - You’re a speaker at a conference in a large venue. During your talk you’d like to poll your audience to find out whether they use a Mac, Windows or Linux. You’ve got an interactive chart in your slides which will update as the audience votes on your web app. But there’s a hitch, you — as the speaker, have access to a private WiFi, but your attendees don’t have that.
Jamstack has brought forward a great way to rethink the infrastructure of modern-day websites. It shows us just how much we can abstract away in the process of serving websites and, as a result, gain tremendous benefits to User and Developer Experience. However, much confusion exists around what kind of websites can actually fall under this classification.
Here at Ably, we deal with hard engineering problems all the time and pushing at the edges often results in us running up against all sorts of interesting gotchas. We recently made some AWS NLBs fall over, and had a hazardous encounter with Cassandra counter columns. In our day-to-day, we use gRPC for fast and efficient data exchange with mutual client/server state synchronization.
Everything that occurs is a change in state, or an event for short: the sun comes out, the bus arrives, plants emerge from the ground, a neighbor says hello, the calendar page turns to a certain date or time, or your team lead yells that you should get to da choppa. Among all events, the ones that must be observed, recorded, or otherwise acted upon can be categorized based on how timely the reaction needs to be.
In this post, we take a look at 5 pub/sub examples that will help us understand how companies and organizations across all types of industries are leveraging this architectural design pattern to solve common engineering challenges and improve their architecture.
