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.

Ably's Lead Distributed Systems Engineer takes us on a journey of obscure settings, red herrings, and poll vs. epoll through Elixir and Erlang, and shares lessons learned from hunting down an obscure setting in the Erlang VM.

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.

Diff algorithms are the basis of many everyday developer tools such as Git. But there's limited knowledge on the subject. Here we collate our research to provide systematic knowledge on deltas and diffs.

An opinionated guide on the concepts any Distributed Systems Engineering should have a thorough understanding of. Whether you're looking for a role or recruiting for your team, you'll find actionable insight in this article.

A technical review of the live score feature in Google search results, delivered with some surprisingly old-school tech from the 90s.

Converting a distributed system to FIFO and exactly-once message processing requires considerable user effort. This article looks at why this is the case, serving as a guide about what to bear in mind when implementing a FIFO and exactly-once message processing scenario using SQS FIFO queues.

Typical debugging issues in Elixir Erlang - and how to solve them: notes from realtime distributed systems engineer