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• We've been acquired by Fastly

  Mar 30, 2022 • posted by justin • filed under faas, fanout, grip, pushpin, realtime, scalability, websockets

  I’m excited to share that Fanout is now part of Fastly! Over the coming months we’ll be rolling out our realtime/push capabilities onto their global network.

  See also Fastly’s announcement.

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• Vercel and WebSockets

  Sep 21, 2020 • posted by justin • filed under api, faas, grip, realtime, websockets

  Vercel makes it easy to deploy and scale HTTP APIs using Serverless Functions. However, it’s not possible to use serverless functions to host WebSocket APIs. Does this mean you need to give up on your hopes and dreams and set up normal servers to handle your WebSockets? No way! Vercel can be combined with Fanout Cloud to handle WebSocket connections without having to literally host them.

  

  By using Vercel and Fanout Cloud together, API logic can be kept in one place. Fanout Cloud can manage the WebSocket connections, and invoke functions whenever there is client activity. What’s great about this approach is there’s nothing extra to deploy, and it works at high scale too.

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• Long-lived connections in a serverless world

  Feb 15, 2019 • posted by justin • filed under api, faas, fanout, grip, protocols, realtime, websockets

  In serverless architectures, application logic is often powered by short-lived execution environments. But what does this mean for long-lived connections? After all, many applications today depend on persistent WebSocket or SSE connections in order to exchange data in realtime.

  

  The answer is unsurprising: either the execution limitations must be tolerated, or long-lived connections must be handled by a separate component. We’ll go over these approaches below.

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• WebSockets with AWS Lambda

  Dec 15, 2017 • posted by justin • filed under api, faas, fanout, grip, scalability, websockets

  Fanout Cloud handles long-lived connections, such as HTTP streaming and WebSocket connections, on behalf of API backends. For projects that need to push data at scale, this can be a smart architecture. It also happens to be handy with function-as-a-service backends, such as AWS Lambda, which are not designed to handle long-lived connections on their own. By combining Fanout Cloud and Lambda, you can build serverless realtime applications.

  

  Of course, Lambda can integrate with services such as AWS IoT to achieve a similar effect. The difference with Fanout Cloud is that it works at a lower level, giving you access to raw protocol elements. For example, Fanout Cloud enables you to build a Lambda-powered API that supports plain WebSockets, which is not possible with any other service.

  To make integration easy, we’ve introduced FaaS libraries for Node.js and Python. Read on to learn how it all works.

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