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Irina Nazarova, Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024
and… me
Any
Cable
Pro
Evolution
of real-time,
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder 2
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder 3
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
Trivia
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Vote here now!
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder 5
Summer 2008
Built with
Powered by
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder 6
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
Trivia
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know your heroes
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
The key difference
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-HTTP connection: request, response, CLOSE
-WS connection: request, response, STAY OPEN
PERFECT FOR
REAL-TIME
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
Real-time evolution
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2005 2007 2011 2012 2014 2017 2021 2024
PREHISTORIC DARK AGES FUTURE
CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION 💥
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
Ira Nazarova
CEO
The story of AnyCable
Vova Dementyev
Head of Backend
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder 11
We support
startups building
with Rails
🔗evl.ms/railsstack
Yabeda
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2015
-
2019
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
-First-class built-in support for WebSockets
-Chats, noti
fi
cations, etc. w/o leaving the comfort zone
of the framework
Rails 5 brings Action Cable
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2015
Phoenix—2014, Django—2016, Laravel—2024
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2015
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
-Erlang Go server
-Redis for multi-node clusters
-Action Cable protocol
-Rails plug-in-play integration
-Open source
Vova brings AnyCable
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2016
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
AnyCable in a nutshell
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System of 3
components:
-WS server
(Go)
-Rails with RPC
-Redis
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
-10x less RAM usage
-Lower latency at scale
Motto: "Performant WebSockets
for Rails"
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2016
🥇
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
-Action Cable said “You can build real-time features”
-AnyCable said “And you can scale them”
It aged well
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WebSockets, caution no longer required!
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
The only thing missing was…
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😷 2020
-
2021
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder 21
😷
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder 22
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
Pre Pro era
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Consulting gigs
-Working closely with AnyCable users
helped us to better understand our
powers and their needs
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
Pre Pro era
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Consulting gigs
-Working closely with AnyCable users
helped us to better understand our
powers and their needs
-We learned use cases and
industries: GPS tracking, virtual
events, edtech, devtools
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
-Working closely with AnyCable users
helped us to better understand our
powers and their needs
-We learned use cases and
industries: GPS tracking, virtual
events, edtech, devtools
-As a result, we launched the
fi
rst
major version 1.0!
Pre Pro era
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Consulting gigs
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AnyCable learnings
Something about scaling
WebSockets
Architecture vs. scaling
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder 27
Imagine your server as a phone line:
☎ HTTP requests are like brief phone
calls: you dial, get information, and hang
up.
🌎 WebSocket connections are like the
dial-up modem
If the two are competing,
WebSockets win all
resources they need–as
seen by our customers
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder 28
Realtime/WebSocket
requests should be serviced
and scaled independently
from HTTP
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder 29
AnyCable learnings
Big apps with scale reached out.
For them, we needed tools:
-xk6-cable for load testing
-wsdirector for scenario-based
system tests
Ecosystem was missing
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
-GraphQL subscriptions
-Fallback to long-polling
-Voice applications (Twilio Media
Streams)
AnyCable next
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What people wanted
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Build it
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Open-source
a communal garden
Commercial Pro
a professional farm
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
2021 launching the Pro
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Key Pro feature:
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-
50% RAM savings (vs. OSS)
Binary compression
Apollo GraphQL integration
Priority support
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– GitHub Container Registry
– $990 per year
fl
at price
– EULA
– Typeform for signups
– Manual emails, calls,
invoices
– No “license server”
Keep it simple!
2021 launching the Pro
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
🇫🇷 Callbell.eu, our first Pro customer 💙
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Shared inbox for support: WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and Telegram
For Callbell low
latency is crucial
Callbell is 🔥
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
💡Unexpectedly, paying customers
turned out to be a lot more
engaging and responsive than users
of open-source
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2021
-
2024
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
2021
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Released the client
library:
-TypeScript support
-works with any JS
runtime: React Native,
Ionic, etc.
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
2021
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Pushing backend-rendered
templates over WebSocket to
all connected clients
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
2021
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✅ Standalone mode for
apps only using WS for
Hotwire:
– no RPC server
– only 2 components out
of 3
We wanted to do
something extra
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
2021 results
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Trials: 20
Paying
customers: 6
End-year ARR:
$6k
Consulting
revenue:
$320k
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
💡The results were not
stellar, so we had to focus on
other things…
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
2022
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RailsConf 2022 “The pitfalls of
realtime-i
fi
cation”
Recorded screencasts
Launched newsletter
Marketing all-in
SUBSCRIBE blog.anycable.io
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On a real-time scale, connectivity is not that solid and smooth
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
2022 results
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Trials: 18
Paying
customers:
14
End-year
ARR: $12k
Consulting
revenue:
$1M 🎉
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
💡With $1M consulting revenue
per year, AnyCable became
vital for Evil Martians...
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
...but the product itself didn't
sky-rocket—marketing is not
enough 🤔
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
2023
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The paradigm shift
-Reliable communication
-Simpli
fi
ed infra
-More protocols (Twilio Media
Streams, OCPP)
-SSE support
Move focus from performance
to features and DX:
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
Exactly-once delivery in WebSockets
with AnyCable
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-Exactly-once delivery
of real-time data
-Resume WS sessions
automatically on
deployments (Pro)
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💡We now recommend
using AnyCable from day 1
for reliable delivery
PERFECT FOR
REAL-TIME
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
Simplified setup with NATS
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We added
embedded NATS
to replace Redis
for multi-region
deployments
for Fly.io
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
EV-charging protocol support
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Testing: UK’s leading EV charging provider
Customer: Malaysia's leading EV charging provider
🔗docs.anycable.io/anycable-go/ocpp
Use AnyCable to monitor and
operate charging stations in
real time
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
AnyCable:
-Gets a WS voice stream from
Twilio
-Sends chunks it to real-time
speech-to-text API
-(Proxies other processing steps)
-Noti
fi
es Rails
Voice apps
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Twilio media streams support
🔗
github.com/anycable/anycable-go-sca
ff
old
used by
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
-Safari
fi
nally got support
-LLMs (ChatGPT)
popularized SSE for
response streaming
-Use AnyCable for LLM
streaming over WS or SSE
Server-sent events
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LLMs' native realtime transport
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
AnyCable over SSE
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No libs attached
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
2023 results
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Trials: 39
Paying
customers:
23
End-year
ARR: $21k
Consulting
revenue:
$
1M
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
2024
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The even bigger paradigm shift
-Serverless JS and other vercels
-Universal pub/sub interface (no
channels attached)
-Managed AnyCable
Go beyond Ruby and Rails:
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Vercel Template
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
-No RPC component required
-Only 1 component out of 3
-Whispering support (client-
to-client broadcasting)
Simplified pub/sub
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AnyCable as one component
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
Whispering
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Go to anycable.io now
What to whisper
🔗anycable.io
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder 62
But what about Managed AnyCable?
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What’s the most e
ff i
cient way to
build a managed service?🧐
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
🔗plus.anycable.io
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🔗go.anycable.io/gem
fi
le
We launched Managed AnyCable
in Alpha
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder 65
We added anonymous telemetry to
AnyCable-go
big open source
servers
big Pro servers
people on old
versions PostHog dropping
our data
Unique servers with over 1k concurrent connections
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
2024 Jan-Aug results
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Trials: 60
Paying
customers:
29
ARR: $30k
Consulting
revenue:
$480k
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💡 New trials are growing
which means that our new
approach works!
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
Today AnyCable is the critical
infrastructure powering some of
the largest Rails apps
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$3B legal services SaaS
Leading American transit SaaS
Malaysia's Leading EV Charging Company
communication platform
used by 80% of US doctors
marketing SaaS with $160M+
revenue
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
💡 Our customers and big use
cases give us the confidence
to move forward
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
What we have
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✅ Solve a real problem
✅ And for real big use cases
✅ And new cases keep coming up
We solved the backend and infra:
- integration
- scaling
- dependability
- reliability
- no lock on cloud provider
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
What we don’t have
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2024-future
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
Higher-level abstractions
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Common tasks must be easy to implement:
– UI kits
– Collaboration SDK
UI-centric real-time
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
Simplify and simplify again
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There’s a lot to be done to be AnyCable easier
to reach for:
– Guides & tutorials (incl. AI-powered)
– Zero-con
fi
guration installs
– Managed AnyCable for production
Make it accessible for more engineers
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
-WebTransport is coming
-Whatever’s the next new thing
Future transports
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AnyCable will integrate with the new realtime tech
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
Evolution of … myself
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Manager ➡ co-founder
Contributing to the product strategy
A member of the Ruby community
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder
Evolution of … myself
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Thanks to the unwavering trust of
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SF BAY AREA RUBY MEETUP
Unwavering… almost!
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Rocky Mountain Ruby 2024 Boulder 79
This is how we laid out the foundations of AnyCable