Elasticity is far from a solved problem – especially for transportation and logistics companies providing realtime updates. Prior to 2006, startups finding sudden success had to drive – often in a hurry – to a store like Best Buy to purchase new servers and support an unexpected surge in users.

RabbitMQ is one of the most popular open source message brokers. It is designed to provide high availability, scalability and reliability for enterprise level messaging applications. RabbitMQ basically navigates exchanges between a client (producer) and a consumer, who receives these processed messages. Messages are bundled into queues based on their characteristics and adequately processed. This segregation helps organize data much easier and makes alloting similar functions to a single queue.

We are excited to announce the release of the Ably Kafka Connector 3.0. Version 3 brings a host of improvements, including: Overall, the Ably Kafka connector v3.0 makes the management of Kafka pipelines extension to millions of web and mobile users simpler and more reliable.

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that allows developers to run their code without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. With Lambda, developers can upload their code and the service takes care of scaling, provisioning, and managing the servers required to run the code. This means developers can focus on writing code and not worry about the underlying infrastructure.

With the rise of online ordering and the growth of delivery, consumers and businesses alike order more packages, expect them faster, and want rapid updates on progress, delays, and changes. Companies providing transportation and logistics services, then, have a compelling reason to add realtime update features to their apps. In other articles, we’ve talked about the broad challenges transport and logistics companies face when providing realtime updates, including scalability and low latency.

In the past decade, chat apps have gone from being a disruptive new technology to something we use every day. Today, WhatsApp boasts over 2 billion daily active users, by far the market leader, followed by WeChat with 1.3 billion and Facebook Messenger at just under 1 billion. Chat apps, put simply, are going nowhere. In that time, customers have come to expect a consistent experience across their chat apps – and a core set of functionality has evolved across all major providers.

Elasticity, as the term implies, is the ability for software infrastructure to stretch and shrink in line with fluctuating usage. Elasticity is important in many contexts – because usage can always fluctuate – but it’s especially important for sports, media, and entertainment apps, which frequently serve user bases that grow and shrink rapidly depending on events, trends, and breaking news.

The transportation and logistics industries contain much more complexity than the average consumer would guess. When they build apps, they need to provide a simple, intuitive experience supported by a complex and most often unseen system of vehicles criss-crossing neighborhoods, states, and countries, supported by employees and systems working from behind the scenes to orchestrate the processes necessary to make this all work smoothly.

Code Story is a podcast that invites tech leaders to reflect on their journeys, the products they’ve created, their successes, and their mistakes. Our CEO Matthew O’Riordan recently spoke with host Noah Labhart to share more about Ably’s story and the lessons he’s learned along the way. You can listen to the full episode here, but we’ve pulled out a few highlights below.