DeveloperWeek Austin 2017

In-app chat builds strong communities and makes real-time communication a core feature in your mobile app. But how do you build a responsive, scalable chat infrastructure? A reliable chat solution is more than merely multiplying nodes or adding resources ad hoc. Developers must leverage several key components to make chat work without fail. This talk will examine several major challenges when building an in-app chat infrastructure, including: - Low latency message delivery (on the order of milliseconds) to be considered real time - Guaranteed message delivery - High Concurrency - support millions of chat connections simultaneously - High volume traffic spikes (burst): The user presence, online/offline status, can be very difficult to scale during peak traffic. The traffic spike isn’t necessarily caused by users sending messages, but often a result of a massive amount of active app users presence status updates as cycling through constant connection and disconnection or connection retries, which could put up significant traffic and consume notable resources. - Broad Platform support (iOS, Android, Web) - Network optimization: Optimized protocol by reducing message relay for reduced bandwidth data and processing resources consumption; Smart Heartbeat- Keep connection alive with less network consumption - Mobile device optimization: Reduced bandwidth data consumption; Lower battery consumption with efficient data usage - State and session consistency: Synchronous states and login sessions; Ensure synchronous messaging between devices for an individual users. Channels: Internet configurations, firewall; Smart Heartbeat- Dynamically adapt the frequency of packet relays based on environment - Failover recovery: Recover gracefully without message lost