WebSockets in a serverless world

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Serverless and WebSockets is a bit of a contradiction. Serverless implies that we’re not managing servers ourselves, they’ve been abstracted away for our convenience. WebSockets allow us to communicate between a “client” and a “server”, but what happens when that server is “serverless”?! By Jo Franchetti.

WebSockets enable a connection between a browser and a web server which stays open, unlike alternatives like HTTP polling. This persistent connection means that data can be transferred as it happens, in realtime.

You will get walkthrough:

  • What does serverless mean, actually?
  • What are WebSockets, actually?
  • Why are people confused by the idea of serverless WebSockets?
  • Serverless WebSockets with Ably
  • Getting Started with Ably and Netlify
  • Adding Ably to your existing Netlify apps

It is often joked that serverless is just “somebody else’s server”. This is the premise of serverless. It is someone else’s server, and also their maintenance, patching and provisioning cycle, operations, capacity planning and engineering. Good read!

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Tags frontend web-development app-development serverless apis