Publish-Subscribe: Introduction to Scalable Messaging

Matthew O’Riordan A serial entrepreneur and seasoned developer with over 15 years of hands-on development experience. Matthew is the CEO of Ably, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider. He was co-founder and technical director of Aqueduct, a leading digital agency in London and Founder of easyBacklog, a SaaS agile backlog management tool. Matthew co-founded Econsultancy, a global digital marketing publishing, training and research business, with Ashley Friedlein and exited via a £25m trade sale to Centaur Media plc in 2012. The publish-subscribe (or pub/sub) messaging pattern is a design pattern that provides a framework for exchanging messages that allows for loose coupling and scaling between the sender of messages (publishers) and receivers (subscribers) on topics they subscribe to. Messages are sent (pushed) from a publisher to subscribers as they become available. The host (publisher) publishes messages (events) to channels (topics). Subscribers can sign up for the topics they are interested in. This is different from the standard request/response (pull) models in which publishers check if new data has become available. This makes the pub/sub method the most suitable framework for streaming data in real-time. It also means that dynamic networks can be built at internet scale. However, building a messaging infrastructure at Continue reading