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.

Like many other companies, Ably began working remotely because of the Covid pandemic. In time, we discovered that a remote-first approach is well suited and a key driver to our success. Remote-first makes the most sense to us, considering our mission and the goals we want to achieve. It has many perks, such as being able to hire diverse talent from all over the globe, as well as reaching more customers with our technology and product offering.

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.

To ensure a great user experience, whether that’s attending a live virtual event, chatting with friends or collaborating on a document, you need to ensure that the core realtime works in any situation and that you provide a feature-rich application. Disruption, downtime or lags result in poor realtime user experiences.

When building modern web applications, it is increasingly important to be able to handle realtime data with an event-driven architecture to propagate messages to all connected clients instantly. Several protocols are available, but WebSocket is arguably the most widely used as it is optimized for minimum overhead and low latency. The WebSocket protocol supports bidirectional, full-duplex communication between client and server over a persistent, single-socket connection.

As e-commerce has continued to mature, the level of service expected from consumers creates the need to build more reactive experiences. To meet those expectations, you’ll need a site that shows up-to-date information, with reliable displays of the latest product availability and discounts provided frictionlessly. We’ll be using Fauna and Ably to build this site.

Developers frequently choose Ably for building chat applications or to provide chat functionality in their products. While dev teams in different companies have different priorities, overall our customers tell us that using our serverless WebSockets platform frees them to fully focus on delivering the best possible core user experience. Just like our customers, we too like to keep our users happy.