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Hey Sean, Matt here, co-founder of Ably. I have been meaning to write a blog post on this in fact, like I did some time back for ActionCable, see https://blog.a

Hey Sean, Matt here, co-founder of Ably. I have been meaning to write a blog post on this in fact, like I did some time back for ActionCable, see https://blog.ably.io/rails-5-actioncable-the-good-and-bad-parts-1b56c3b31404 https://blog.ably.io/rails-5-actioncable-the-good-and-bad-pa.... I've not done an in-depth review yet, but from what I can tell SignalR has the following shortfalls: - It relies on a single message bus for message passing between nodes. If your rate of messages exceeds what the bus can handle, you're in trouble. - I don't believe it handles connection state recovery as a service, and certainly does not do that across moving connections i.e. a disconnected client may arrive an another server yet messages may have been published whilst disconnected. - SignalR does not support multi-regions, once again due to the central bus, so if you have users in Asia and your datacenter in US, they'll all have to route everything through US. To be quite honest though, we're now rarely having discussions about technology X versus Ably, because Ably is realtime platform-as-a-service, and not a software solution. To provide the scale, reach, resilience and feature set we have, it can only be achieved with a combination of infrastructure and software. So our customers are choosing us because we're investing a lot of time and effort in all aspects of the service, not just the realtime software itself. See https://blog.ably.io/routing-around-single-point-of-failure-dns-issues-7c20a8757903#.oqciqec1t https://blog.ably.io/routing-around-single-point-of-failure-... for details on how the Dyn attack did not affect us for example, or https://blog.ably.io/the-18-ghosts-in-your-infrastructure-stack-that-can-cause-failure-and-how-to-avoid-them-1373daebfe1a#.b7ya3o94o https://blog.ably.io/the-18-ghosts-in-your-infrastructure-st... for some details on we've built necessary resilience into every aspect of the system. I plan on doing an in-depth SignalR review soon in fact, thanks for the prod.

sean_patel 10y ago
Thank you Matt! I see your value proposition now. MaaS as a SaaS (i.e. Messaging as a Service as a Software as a Service) :) I still think that the strongest use case would be for large enterprises ( think Uber) that would be spread across geographical locations and would need something like this - reliable, with state saved and spread across data-centers. For the rest of us (think young startups, smaller shops) your costs may be prohibitive ( almost 6K / year).
- SEMW 10y ago
  Hi - Matt's tied up atm, but I'll try and reply. (I'm also at Ably). > For the rest of us (think young startups, smaller shops) your costs may be prohibitive ( almost 6K / year) I'm afraid I don't follow that. We have a generous free tier (a lot of startups are fine just on that), and self service packages starting at $20/month. And very cheap overage pricing - $1.25 per million messages + $12.50 per 1000 peak concurrent connections, so people who aren't sure how much they're going to use (often the case with startups) can just pay what they use. I've linked to it elsewhere in the thread, but: see https://www.ably.io/pricing/self-service https://www.ably.io/pricing/self-service. I think you reached that number from the cost of the 'enterprise' package, but that's really for companies whose corporate policy requires that they have a personal account manager they can call at any time or something, or who want customised versions of things (eg versions of client libs with our name replaced by theirs connecting to a CNAME on their domain). Not really relevant for young startups. > did you see that there was a 'problem' in the space and built an MVP, or did you create this need? Re how we came to be, Matt has a blog post on that - https://blog.ably.io/the-story-of-how-ably-came-to-be-1d859f2c9a90#.cri0ppexg https://blog.ably.io/the-story-of-how-ably-came-to-be-1d859f... We weren't the first company in the space -- e.g. Pusher and Pubnub were both here before us -- but we weren't happy with the existing solutions for a bunch of reasons, see https://www.ably.io/compare https://www.ably.io/compare
  - sean_patel 10y ago
    Ok, I get it now. It looks like your Team has put a lot of thought into the Pricing model, and now the way you have explained it, everything makes sense. Also, this quote from the blog post rings true. > The barriers to entry are truly immense due to the incredibly complexity, brainpower and investment we have made in our product. Thank you and I wish you the best with your startup!
sean_patel 10y ago
1 more thing, while you are here Matt. Did you guys have a client for who you built this for, and then branched out into a SaaS / startup, or did you just build it and then tried to get clients later? i.e. did you see that there was a 'problem' in the space and built an MVP, or did you create this need? Thank you! ~Sean

sean_patel 10y ago

Thank you Matt! I see your value proposition now. MaaS as a SaaS (i.e. Messaging as a Service as a Software as a Service) :) I still think that the strongest use case would be for large enterprises ( think Uber) that would be spread across geographical locations and would need something like this - reliable, with state saved and spread across data-centers. For the rest of us (think young startups, smaller shops) your costs may be prohibitive ( almost 6K / year).

SEMW 10y ago
Hi - Matt's tied up atm, but I'll try and reply. (I'm also at Ably). > For the rest of us (think young startups, smaller shops) your costs may be prohibitive ( almost 6K / year) I'm afraid I don't follow that. We have a generous free tier (a lot of startups are fine just on that), and self service packages starting at $20/month. And very cheap overage pricing - $1.25 per million messages + $12.50 per 1000 peak concurrent connections, so people who aren't sure how much they're going to use (often the case with startups) can just pay what they use. I've linked to it elsewhere in the thread, but: see https://www.ably.io/pricing/self-service https://www.ably.io/pricing/self-service. I think you reached that number from the cost of the 'enterprise' package, but that's really for companies whose corporate policy requires that they have a personal account manager they can call at any time or something, or who want customised versions of things (eg versions of client libs with our name replaced by theirs connecting to a CNAME on their domain). Not really relevant for young startups. > did you see that there was a 'problem' in the space and built an MVP, or did you create this need? Re how we came to be, Matt has a blog post on that - https://blog.ably.io/the-story-of-how-ably-came-to-be-1d859f2c9a90#.cri0ppexg https://blog.ably.io/the-story-of-how-ably-came-to-be-1d859f... We weren't the first company in the space -- e.g. Pusher and Pubnub were both here before us -- but we weren't happy with the existing solutions for a bunch of reasons, see https://www.ably.io/compare https://www.ably.io/compare
- sean_patel 10y ago
  Ok, I get it now. It looks like your Team has put a lot of thought into the Pricing model, and now the way you have explained it, everything makes sense. Also, this quote from the blog post rings true. > The barriers to entry are truly immense due to the incredibly complexity, brainpower and investment we have made in our product. Thank you and I wish you the best with your startup!

sean_patel 10y ago

1 more thing, while you are here Matt. Did you guys have a client for who you built this for, and then branched out into a SaaS / startup, or did you just build it and then tried to get clients later? i.e. did you see that there was a 'problem' in the space and built an MVP, or did you create this need? Thank you! ~Sean