The digital currency Bitcoin has been grabbing headlines recently, which is a good indication of how much the currency has been blowing up recently in terms of popularity.
This meant increased infrastructure needs for MtGox, one of the world’s largest Bitcoin exchanges. To power the exchange, MtGox must broadcasts massive volumes of real-time financial data. But it was having difficulty to coping with the volume of data it needed to stay a reliable market. So it turned to PubNub.
“There are two major challenges with real-time,” noted PubNub developer evangelist Dan Ristic this past November at the WebRTC Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, Calif. He said that while developing a real-time platform is part of the work, the lion’s share of the challenge with real-time is keeping up with the deployment needs as a real-time system scales.
“Seventy-five percent of the problem actually comes from deployment and scaling—figuring out what’s my network topology, how do I get around firewalls, how do I do load balancing, how do I do load testing, security, and redundancy in replication between all of these different servers,” he said.
PubNub was launched four years ago to address this issue. The company offers a globally scaled, distributed real-time network that makes real-time as easy for developers as Amazon makes cloud storage accessible to all.
“We provide the core building blocks for building these real-time applications,” said Ristic. “And they are generic enough for anyone to use.”
It delivers presence, analytics, storage and playback, security in a platform that’s global and already set up for mobile.
Now the company is making WebRTC as easy as it has made other real-time services on its network.
At the show in November, the company released its an open-source WebRTC framework that developers can use to plugin to their application that leverages PubNub’s infrastructure.
“Now you can do WebRTC without having to set up a signaling server,” said Ristic. “So we provide a globally-scaled signaling and presence server to not only see who’s online and offline, but also provide the framework to connect to them without having to spin up a bunch of servers.”
PubNub makes it almost too easy, and that might be why it came away with the Beyond the Call award during the show.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
