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Serverless

What is a service mesh?

A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that manages traffic, also known as communication, between services in applications composed of containerized microservices. It is a critical component in a microservices architecture, responsible for the secure, fast, and reliable communication between services. This article answers a lot of the questions you may have about service meshes: What are they and how do they work? Who is using them and why?

Visualize Azure serverless workflow progress in realtime with pubsub

A suitable way to update a front-end from back-end processes is to use pubsub over WebSockets. In this video I'll show how to use Ably, a cloud based pubsub service, to visualize the progress of a serverless workflow implemented with Azure Functions and Durable Functions. About Ably Ably is an enterprise-grade pub/sub messaging platform. We make it easy to efficiently design, quickly ship, and seamlessly scale critical realtime functionality delivered directly to end-users. Every day, we deliver billions of realtime messages to millions of users for thousands of companies.

Distributed tracing with Envoy, Kuma, Grafana Agent, and Jaeger

As a cloud service provider, observability is a critical subject as it's strongly related to the availability of the services running on the platform. We need to understand everything that is happening on our platform to troubleshoot errors as fast as possible and improve performance issues. A year ago, while the platform was still in private beta, we faced a tough reliability issue: users were facing random 500 errors when accessing their applications.

How to build a serverless WebSockets platform

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.

Heroku's free tier legacy: The shoulders we stand on 15 years later

On August 15, 2022, we learned the shocking news that free Heroku Dynos, Heroku Postgres and Heroku Data for Redis will no longer be available and existing services will either need to upgrade to a paid service or find another hosting solution by November 28, 2022. Since its conception, Heroku has changed the way developers, hobbyists, students, and indie hackers deploy applications.

What is an API Gateway?

An API gateway is a server that sits between your backend services and your users. It provides an abstraction layer that helps you manage the communication between clients and your services. API gateways are a single point of entry into a microservices application and they work like a reverse proxy: They receive API calls from clients, route them to the right microservices in the backend, and return aggregated responses to clients.

Serverless WebSockets with Azure Functions

This video complements the blog post and demo about Serverless WebSockets with Azure Functions. I'll explain how data is distributed in realtime using WebSockets in a serverless application running in Azure. The context is a multiplayer Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (ADnD) style game that is turn-based with realtime state updates. About Ably