Ably Engineering Achieving exactly-once delivery with Ably Discover what exactly-once means in the context of distributed pub/sub systems, and the exactly-once guarantees that the Ably realtime pub/sub messaging platform provides.
Ably Engineering Why Ably integrates with functions instead of delivering them 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 Engineering Adventures in BEAM optimization with our MQTT adapter 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.
Ably Engineering Cassandra counter columns: nice in theory, hazardous in practice 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.
Ably Engineering Delta Compression: A practical guide to diff algorithms and delta file formats 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.
Ably Engineering The Realtime API Family What do Event-driven, Streaming, Push, and Pub/Sub APIs all have in common? They're all part of the Realtime API Family.
Ably Engineering What is a Distributed Systems Engineer? 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.
Ably Engineering Five strategies to remove single points of DNS failure June/July 2019’s Cloudflare incidents got the world thinking about additional safeguards against ‘unlikely’ DNS failure. The article below sheds light on five strategies for coping with these unlikely - but possible - DNS failures, as well as general advice for service reliability.
Ably Engineering Google - polling like it's the 90s A technical review of the live score feature in Google search results, delivered with some surprisingly old-school tech from the 90s.
Ably Engineering SQS FIFO Queues: Message Ordering and Exactly-Once Processing Guaranteed? 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.
