Real-time applications such as chat for streaming videos, interactive whiteboards, and IoT dashboards are becoming ever more popular and familiar to a wide audience. Businesses are now keen to build such applications to enhance user experiences and real-time interactions with their end customers.

So, here is the newest one – Azure Web PubSub service for building real-time web applications with WebSockets. WebSocket is a standardized protocol that provides full-duplex communication. It is key to building efficient real-time web interactions. What is more, it is supported by all major browsers as well as web servers.

It is Fully manageable and globally available

In order to implement a WebSocket-based real-time experience, a developer would first need to set up infrastructure for handling client connections, establish mechanisms to scale it on demand and ensure the setup is able to meet business SLA requirements. This infrastructure management takes away a developer’s time from focusing on end-user experiences, and the Azure Web PubSub service was built to solve this.

Azure Web PubSub service in Azure portal; Photo Credits: Microsoft Azure

There is also a native WebSocket support

The Azure Web PubSub service supports native WebSocket and a wide variety of programming languages (including C#, Python, and Java) through WebSocket APIs. This gives you the flexibility to build real-time cross-platform applications, and also migrate your existing WebSocket-based applications easily.

Test the serverless real-time applications with Azure Functions

The Azure Web PubSub service is natively integrated with Azure Functions and allows you to build serverless applications in C#, JavaScript, Python, and Java using WebSockets. Serverless solutions for real-time applications—using Azure Functions and Azure Web PubSub service—allow you to write less code, maintain less infrastructure, and save on costs. Consider a location tracking live dashboard.

Let’s get started with Azure Web PubSub

If you want to learn more about the Azure Web PubSub service, visit the Azure Web PubSub service page, and check out the preview documentation.