PubSub Infrastructure with Stephen Blum

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.

Transcript

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