Add guide for building a scalable notifications center using Ably#2985
Add guide for building a scalable notifications center using Ably#2985splindsay-92 wants to merge 33 commits intomainfrom
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Nice guide! Just a few comments left.
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Added a few comments and questions, but this is looking good.
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| Clients may not always be online when a notification arrives. Ably provides multiple mechanisms to ensure they receive important notifications: | ||
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| ### Short-term message history |
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I'm not sure this can really be classified as a method for handling offline notifications, as you'd need to know the duration each client has been offline for in order to ensure no notifications were missed.
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I don't think tracking duration is a prohibitive problem, but perhaps this section would be better renamed to Temporary disconnections and focus only on connection recovery for short term?
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| The right integration depends on your throughput, ordering requirements, and infrastructure: | ||
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| **AWS Lambda / Serverless Functions:** |
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This section is a bit overwhelming in terms of bold and bullets.
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I've reworked this to use small paragraphs instead of the bullet/bold approach. I have kept the Recommended when: as I think its good to bring attention to this.
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| // Retrieve notifications received while offline | ||
| const historyPage = await inbox.history({ limit: 50, untilAttach:true }); |
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Wouldn't this require some way of knowing which notifications they've previously seen or acknowledged?
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Good point, I'll add in some detail around using the message.id field to check if a message has been handled.
| This is common in internal systems where notifications might inform clients of completed processes, | ||
| status updates, or system alerts that can be reviewed when a client connects. | ||
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| ### Push notifications for critical alerts |
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What do you think about discussing;
- Direct vs channel publishing to matching up with your inbox vs general inbox pattern above?
- Web push in certain scenarios.
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I've tried to keep this diving too much into the push notifications guide, since this I think is all covered there. I've linked to that guide here too, although the link won't work until push notifications guide is merged.
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| Delivering notifications in realtime is critical for user engagement. Ably's [serverless architecture](/docs/platform/architecture) eliminates the need to manage websocket servers. It automatically scales to handle millions of concurrent connections without provisioning or maintenance, while handling all edge-cases around delivery, failover, and scaling. | ||
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| For notifications that need to reach users even when they're offline, Ably integrates seamlessly with push notification services like [Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) and Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM)](/docs/push), ensuring your users never miss important updates. |
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Should also include web push here
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| When designing your notification center, consider the following channel structure: | ||
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| <Code> |
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I'm not sure this needs to be a code snippet
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| The decision comes down to cost and frequency: | ||
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| * **Individual inboxes:** are best when broadcast notifications are infrequent. You pay per message published and per user receiving it. |
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I think we're missing a key aspect here - what about when only one person should receive a notification? Notifications specific to a given user shouldn't be sent to everyone.
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The caveat above this on line 65 states,
For notifications that need to reach all clients, you have two architectural options:`
So we are only talking about the cases where you want to talk to all users. Perhaps this section isn't clear enough, though? I could change the title to Handling broadcasts?
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| **History capability:** | ||
| Including the `history` capability allows clients to retrieve notifications they might have missed while offline. |
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Isn't this also something push would handle?
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I've reworked this whole section to focus on push, history is now only briefly mentioned.
| * Publish 1 notification to the general channel | ||
| * 10,000 clients are subscribed to the general channel | ||
| * Cost: 1 inbound message + 10,000 outbound messages = **10,001 messages** | ||
| * Plus: Channel attachment cost for 10,000 clients subscribed to the general channel |
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This is the same in Option 1 and 2. The billing dimension is connections, not attachments.
| * Cost: 1 inbound message + 10,000 outbound messages = **10,001 messages** | ||
| * Plus: Channel attachment cost for 10,000 clients subscribed to the general channel | ||
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| If clients are connected for an average of 4 hours per day: |
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The channel minutes are based on the channel being active, not who's connected to it.
| * Channel minutes per client per day: 4 × 60 = 240 minutes | ||
| * Total channel minutes per month: 10,000 clients × 240 minutes × 30 days = **72,000,000 channel minutes/month** | ||
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| #### Cost comparison |
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Given my comments above, I'll skip the remainder of the cost section for now
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| ### Push notifications for critical alerts | ||
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| For user-facing applications where notifications require attention even when the app is not running, push notifications can be used. These are particularly useful for social interactions, time-sensitive alerts, or critical updates that users should act upon immediately. |
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I'd personally like to see this session moved up and given more prominence - I think push is a key feature for notifications (more so than annotations). I would have expected it to form a core part of the solution.
…pecifically extended.
…o a single paragraph
… production checklist.
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| Delivering notifications in realtime is critical for user engagement. Ably's [serverless architecture](/docs/platform/architecture) eliminates the need to manage websocket servers. It automatically scales to handle millions of concurrent connections without provisioning or maintenance, while handling all edge-cases around delivery, failover, and scaling. | ||
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| For notifications that need to reach users even when they're offline, Ably integrates seamlessly with push notification services like [Apple Push Notification Service](https://developer.apple.com/notifications/) (APNS), [Firebase Cloud Messaging](https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging) (FCM)] and [web push](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API), ensuring your users never miss important updates. |
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Extra square bracket after FCM
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Description
Add a guide that focuses on building a notifications center with Ably pubsub using Ably integrations to perform pre-processing on outbound notifications.
FF-164
TODO: There are a few diagrams/images that might be useful, I will ask design once we are happy with the content.
Checklist