When I tell developers about Fanout Cloud, their reaction usually takes one of two forms:

  • Sign me up!
  • Why would I use an external service for this? Push is easy. I can do it in 20 minutes with <insert modern web framework>.

It is true that there are a bunch of software solutions that make pushing data in realtime easier, and if you’re enthusiastic about maintaining your own servers then a cloud service may not be that interesting. It’s important to recognize, though, that Fanout Cloud is about more than just making push easy. It’s about making it scalable.

The key to scaling is delegating work among many machines. Fanout Cloud achieves this by load balancing message deliveries across a set of servers. This delegation is even more important for push than it is for traditional request/response traffic. Aside from cases like a single tweet from Ashton Kutcher driving thousands of people to pounce on your website simultaneously, requests tend to be evenly distributed over a given period of time, with a rise during peak hours. This is because there is generally no coordination between clients, and in the case of web traffic people click links with a degree of random timing. Push traffic, on the other hand, is bursty. Suppose your single server website handles 200 hits per second at maximum, but every once in awhile you need to push a message to 5000 recipients. If we say the work needed to handle a hit is roughly the same as the work needed to push a message, then it would take 25 seconds to make all of the deliveries. That’s a long time. Ideally, pushes would be near instantaneous, but is this practical? According to the math, getting 5000 deliveries out in 1 second would require 25 servers!

This is where the power of a shared service can come into play. If you need to push a message to 5000 recipients instantly, once per hour, it is likely wasteful to invest in a heap of distributed server infrastructure that will spend 3599 of every 3600 seconds idle. On the other hand, what if 3600 organizations with identical requirements split the cost? Suddenly a state-of-the-art infrastructure becomes not only affordable, but a steal. This is the reason traditional content delivery networks (CDNs) are popular. Just look at Akamai or Amazon CloudFront. These are powerful services that you would have little hope in replicating on your own unless you are in the business of making CDNs.

I think cost alone makes the case here, but some people may cite that there are drawbacks that come with dependence on an external service. Certainly this is true. Often, the choice to use the cloud is not a pure win but a trade-off: simpler administration in exchange for some loss of control or increased latency. However, keep in mind that the trade-offs vary by service type. If you maintain your documents in Google Docs, you lose control, increase latency, and even limit accessibility (offline situations). If you use the Tumblr service instead of a WordPress install on your own server, you lose control, but latency and accessibility should remain about the same.

With Fanout Cloud, you lose a little bit of control in the way you route network transmissions, but that’s about it. You don’t lose control of your data, as Fanout Cloud is not a database and does not store your data. You might think Fanout Cloud would introduce latency, and while the truth is that it does, it’s the kind of necessary latency that is unavoidable as you grow. In other words, if your web service today consists of a single server in a single location, then Fanout Cloud will indeed add latency. If you’ve grown to the point where you need multiple servers in multiple locations (for example, one server in California and one server in Virginia), then suddenly you may be introducing a small, but necessary amount of latency for sake of scalability. To achieve a Fanout-level of scale or throughput on your own would require making the very same trade-offs, with your own infrastructure.

Stop sweating about how you’ll eventually scale your realtime website, service, or API and check out Fanout Cloud today! It’s easy, works with what you’ve got, and is free to try.