Integrations overview

Ably integrations enable you to send your data from Ably to an external service or push data into Ably from an external service.

Inbound integrations are where one of your external systems is sending data into Ably.

• Inbound Webhooks enable you to configure an endpoint for generated requests to be picked up by Ably and published to a channel.
• The Kafka connector enables you to send data from one or more Kafka topics into Ably channels.

Outbound Webhooks enable you to push data to an external system from within Ably. These events that happen within Ably include messages being published to a channel, presence events being emitted, and changes in the channel occupancy and activity.

The following pre-built Webhooks can be configured:

• AWS Lambda functions
• Google Cloud functions
• Zapier
• Cloudflare Workers
• IFTTT

Outbound streaming involves streaming a constant flow of data from Ably to other streaming or queuing services. This is useful for integrating Ably with large-scale, event-driven architectures or data pipelines.

The following pre-built services can be configured:

• Kafka
• AWS Kinesis
• AMQP
• AWS SQS
• Apache Pulsar

Message queues enable asynchronous communication between a queueing pattern. Producers (Ably channels) publish messages to a queue, and consumers retrieve them in a first-in, first-out order.

Whilst pub-sub channels broadcast messages to all subscribers, queues distribute work among consumers. Both patterns serve different use cases. For example, pub/sub is ideal for many users to receive realtime updates, while queues handle tasks like triggering emails efficiently.