About Ably

Ably is a highly-scalable serverless WebSocket platform used to power realtime digital experiences.

At its core, Ably is a cloud-based Pub/Sub (publish/subscribe) platform-as-a-service (PaaS). It ensures that any messages published to Ably by any device will be received, in realtime, by any number of subscribing devices.

Ably’s platform enables data to be streamed between all internet-connected devices, such as browsers, servers and mobile phones. It offers enterprise-scale messaging, that automatically scales to meet demand, a highly-available service, message delivery guarantees, and low latency across the globe.

Ably is engineered around the following four key principles to ensure the dependability of its service:

Performance

high performance ensures that the end-to-end latency and bandwidth for data sent via the platform is minimized, and maintained at scale.

Integrity

Ably provides guarantees for the realtime messages sent using the Ably platform so that you don’t need to handle missed, duplicated or unordered messages yourself.

Reliability

a fault-tolerant platform is reliable by ensuring that there is sufficient redundancy at a regional and global level to provide continuity of service in the face of infrastructure failures.

Availability

the Ably platform is designed to be elastic and highly-available so that you can use it at any time, even under high load.

The Ably platform has fault-tolerant, highly-available, elastic global infrastructure for effortless scaling.

It is built primarily on Amazon EC2 infrastructure. It runs in 7 physical data centers and utilizes 385 points of presence to ensure that there isn’t a single point of failure, nor single point of congestion across the service. Ably is designed to route messages using the least amount of network hops to minimize latency and maximize performance for clients, regardless of their location.

Each data center scales independently to meet the load within that region. Load is dynamically assigned and reassigned across servers in realtime, and the service auto-heals and routes around network failures.

Ably integrations enable you to send your data from Ably to an external service or push data into Ably from an external service. You can trigger actions in your integrated services when events occur in Ably or send data to Ably from external systems.

Some of the integrations available with Ably include:

• HTTP callbacks for triggering external events.
• IFTTT and Zapier for workflow automation.
• Amazon Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, and Cloudflare Workers for serverless function execution.
• Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon SQS, AMQP, and Pulsar for continuous data streaming.

Use Ably’s products and SDKs to build realtime applications for your clients. They all utilize Ably’s reliable platform to ensure that you don’t need to worry about managing things such as scaling, latency and data integrity.

Ably’s core Pub/Sub product provides flexible APIs that are feature-rich and powerful. These flexible APIs are the building blocks for crafting any type of realtime experience for your customers.

Ably’s other products are built on top of Pub/Sub. They utilize the same platform with the some guarantees and benefits. These products can be considered abstractions, with APIs designed to simplify and build applications more quickly for the most popular use cases.

Use the Ably Chat SDKs to build live chat components in your applications. It provides a set of purpose-built APIs to manage features such as rooms and messages, users’ online status, typing indicators, and room-level reactions.

Chat is an abstraction built over Ably Pub/Sub. It utilizes Ably’s platform to benefit from all of the same performance guarantees and scaling potential.

Chat is effective for use cases such as sports and gaming live streams, 1:1 agent chats, and any other use case that requires users to talk and interact with one another in realtime.

Use the Ably Spaces SDKs to build multiplayer collaborative components in your applications. It provides a set of purpose-built APIs to manage the participate state of users collaborating synchronously in an application, such as their the position of their cursors, or which elements they are interacting with.

Spaces is an abstraction built over Ably Pub/Sub. It utilizes Ably’s platform to benefit from all of the same performance guarantees and scaling potential.

Spaces is effective when building features such as interactive whiteboards, avatar stacks, and displaying and locking elements on a page, such as a cell in a spreadsheet, or a slide in a slideshow presentation.

Use Ably LiveSync to synchronize changes between your database and frontend clients. It provides support for PostgreSQL and MongoDB and uses the Ably platform to synchronize your application’s data.

LiveSync automatically streams changes you make in your database to clients to keep them in sync with the source of truth in your database.

Use the Ably Asset Tracking SDKs to build applications that track the location of assets such as delivery vehicles.

Asset Tracking is an abstraction built over Ably Pub/Sub. It utilizes Ably’s platform to benefit from all of the same performance guarantees and scaling potential.