Pub/Sub

Pub/Sub is Ably’s cloud-based, publish/subscribe, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) product. It provides a set of consistent and idiomatic APIs across a variety of platforms for building realtime capabilities in applications including live data broadcast, push notifications, stream processing, and chat. With Pub/Sub, developers can build applications that communicate in realtime without needing to manage things such as scaling, latency, data integrity and network outages.

Features

Choose from one of the features below to learn more, or select an item from the side navigation.

Channels

The core building blocks of Pub/Sub. Publishers send messages to a channel and subscribers of that channel receive them.

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Presence and occupancy

View information and metrics about clients that are attached to a channel, such as which other clients are currently “present” on the channel, or how many subscribers a channel has.

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History

Retrieve messages that were previously sent on a channel to provide context to those who join a channel.

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Integrations

Integrate with an external service to send all, or a subset of messages to your database, queue, Kafka topic, serverless function, or any custom HTTP endpoint.

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Metadata

Provides insight into activity related to things such as connections, channels and API requests. Use this to indicate when the last subscriber has left a channel or check if there are any subscribers on a channel before publishing to it, for example.

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