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categories: api, api-design, community, condure, faas, fanout, grip, mongrel2, protocols, pushpin, python, realtime, rust, scalability, security, usability, walkthroughs, webhooks, websockets, xmpp, zeromq, zurl

• Realtime Conference 2012 Recap

  Oct 28, 2012 • posted by justin • filed under community

  Realtime Conference 2012 was held in Portland last week. Formerly known as “Keeping it Realtime” in 2011, this was the conference’s second iteration of what is poised to become a regular annual event. Over the course of two days, speakers from around the world came to talk about web development, browser hacks, scaling, optimizations, standards, and anything else of interest to those furthering (or merely observing) the evolution of the realtime Internet. While last year’s talks were focused primarily on realtime web tech and had two tracks, this year was a single track and boasted a broadened scope. Sure, there were still plenty of talks about Node, but we also got a taste of computer history, power grid greenery, wearable devices, and deejay hackery.

  

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• Realtime Conference and XMPP Summit

  Oct 22, 2012 • posted by justin • filed under community, fanout

  Hey people! I’ll be at the Realtime Conference and XMPP Summit in Portland this week. If you want to talk about push, open protocols, federation, etc, just find the guy in the Fanout shirt.

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• Standards at the edge

  Oct 17, 2012 • posted by justin • filed under protocols, xmpp

  As I’ve been a long-time contributor to XMPP, people who know me are generally surprised to discover that Fanout Cloud is not in some way centrally powered by an XMPP server. XMPP is often touted as a solution for realtime communication among servers in a cluster. While this suggestion is not necessarily unsubstantiated, and many services operate this way today, the reality is that many applications have greater needs when it comes to messaging than your typical XMPP software stack provides. I’m talking about real queuing patterns, such as worker balancing, reliability, flow control, “job” queues, etc.

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• Make HTTP requests over ZeroMQ with Zurl

  Sep 26, 2012 • posted by justin • filed under webhooks, zeromq, zurl

  I’m a big fan of ZeroMQ, the peer-to-peer message queuing system. If you’ve never heard of it before, go check out the project’s website. You may need to read the guide and then wait a day or two before it hits you, but it’s the kind of simple, brilliant technology that will eventually make you wonder, “golly, why isn’t everything built this way?” What really sold me on the concept is the Mongrel2 web server. Real-time HTTP becomes a lot easier when you can exchange requests and responses asynchronously over a message queue, and the fact that it’s peer to peer makes the approach practical and easy to scale. Fanout Cloud uses ZeroMQ for the majority of communication between server nodes and components. While Fanout Cloud does support XMPP features, it notably does not use XMPP for internal communication. More on that decision in a future article.

  As Fanout needs to handle both inbound HTTP and outbound HTTP, I thought it would be neat to try and write essentially the inverse of Mongrel2. The result is Zurl, an event-driven server that makes HTTP requests. The software has been released as open source, so it is free to download and use on your own machines.

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• The case for a push CDN

  Sep 18, 2012 • posted by justin • filed under fanout

  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.

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• Realtime multicasting over HTTP/XMPP

  Sep 3, 2012 • posted by justin • filed under api, fanout, protocols, xmpp

  Push is hard. Often, implementing realtime push in a website or web service means having to use unfamiliar software or frameworks. If it isn’t an XMPP server with BOSH, then it’s an esoteric HTTP server framework like Node.js or Tornado. Further, while the knowledge and tools necessary for load balancing a traditional web service are commonly found these days, scaling out and operating a push architecture is less straightforward. The interactions between server nodes are different. The traffic patterns are different. Even if you’ve got a handle on whatever particular approach for push you’re using today, do you know how you’ll scale it tomorrow?

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• Welcome

  Jun 7, 2012 • posted by justin • filed under fanout

  Here we’ll discuss Fanout’s various products (such as Fanout Cloud), as well as topics such as realtime, push, distributed systems, synchronization, federation, and open protocols.