The joke used to be that no piece of software was complete until it could send and receive email. Fast forward to today, replace email with realtime chat, and actually you might not be too far from the truth. Whether you’re delivering customer service, connecting community members, or helping colleagues communicate, realtime chat is quickly becoming a standard part of the web developer’s toolkit.

Ensuring constant availability to your customers in the competitive digital world is crucial for long-term business growth. But availability is just one of the reasons why small business owners should invest in the right chat tool, helpdesk software, and virtual call systems, or a comprehensive solution with multiple built-in functionalities.

Spending two decades in the middleware field has given me deep insight into the evolution of this technology domain. I began my career as a software engineer in a platform group, building reusable components using technologies like object linking and embedding (OLE), the distributed component object model (DCOM) and common object request broker architecture (CORBA).

Live experiences are at the heart of the modern web. And delivering them to small audiences is relatively easy, thanks to protocols such as WebSockets. But there is a challenge. The difficulty involved in scaling WebSockets is non-linear. In other words, there comes a point where serving more clients demands significantly more complex architecture.

Billions of people rely on WhatsApp each day to communicate in realtime. Friends exchange memes, expats catch up with their families, businesses take bookings and run customer support, and teams ranging from emergency services to on-call engineers at tech companies even use WhatsApp as their primary communication tool. So when WhatsApp had an hours-long global outage on 25 October 2022, the world noticed.

In this post I'll explain how to use a cloud pubsub service such as Ably to visualize the progress of a serverless workflow in realtime. You'll learn.