Software Engineering Daily

The pubsub pattern allows a developer to create channels, which messages can be written to and read from. Pubsub messaging is useful for multicast messaging–when you want to publish messages from a producer, and have multiple consumers who are subscribed to the publisher receive those messages. Almost any application that reaches a high level of complexity will need a pubsub system of some kind.

The pubsub system itself can be complex. A pubsub system needs to scale up and down to handle different numbers of consumers and producers, and different volumes of messages. Back in 2010, the growth of mobile and cloud was leading to many new applications with high throughput, multi-user interactions. Developers were standing up their own instances of open source pubsub message queueing systems like RabbitMQ and ZeroMQ. Once the MQ systems needed to scale, the developer would need to handle the scaling. Stephen Blum started his company PubNub around this time, to create automatically scaling APIs for messaging.

Stephen joins the show to discuss the infrastructure choices around building a large scale pubsub service, and how the company has scaled over time. He also talks about the management, product development, and business side of running the company. PubNub has built several additional technologies on top of the core infrastructure that was originally for messaging. Full disclosure: PubNub is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.

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There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to making your app “realtime.” PubNub makes it simple, enabling you to build immersive and interactive experiences on the web, on mobile phones, embedded into hardware, and any other device connected to the Internet. With powerful APIs, and a robust global infrastructure, you can stream geolocation data, send chat messages, turn on your sprinklers, or rock your baby’s crib when they start crying (PubNub literally powers IoT cribs). 70 SDKs for web, mobile, IoT, and more means you can start streaming data in realtime without a ton of compatibility headaches, and no need to build your own SDKs from scratch. Go to PubNub.com/sedaily to get started. They offer a generous sandbox tier that’s free forever (until your app takes off).

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