Paddy Byers

Providing a messaging platform at significant scale means pushing the envelope and encountering AWS NLB limits, both documented and undocumented.

Fault tolerance and dependability at scale require not just availability, but also the tough engineering problem of establishing reliability.

A common requirement in realtime apps is to insert business logic into a message processing pipeline. Rather than offering our own functions, Ably supports these use-cases by providing a reliable gateway to invoke cloud functions or further process messages via the best available cloud services.

Apache Cassandra is trusted to scale at internet level and designed to scale without limits. But a series of incidents in 2020 disrupted our Cassandra instllation. A cautionary tale of using Counters at scale in production, and how we restored our trust in Cassandra.