Integrations

Integrations enable data to be sent from Ably channels to external services and for external services to send data to Ably channels.

Data sent from Ably to an external service is in the form of Ably events. Events include messages published to a channel, all types of presence events emitted by a client’s presence status changes, the creation and closure of channels and changes in channel occupancy.

Integrations can be categorized as webhooks or continuous streaming.

Webhook requests are triggered by Ably events to external services such as IFTTT and Zapier or they can invoke functions such as Amazon Lambda. Alternatively, external services can publish data to Ably using incoming webhooks.

Continuous streaming involves data being streamed from Ably into an external streaming or queuing service such as Amazon Kinesis or Amazon SQS.

Webhook requests to external services can be triggered by Ably events, or webhook endpoints can be registered within Ably so that an external service can publish data to an Ably channel.

Events within Ably can be used to trigger webhook requests to external services.

Events include messages published to a channel, all types of presence events emitted by a client’s presence status changes, the creation and closure of channels and changes in channel occupancy.

Events can be used to trigger requests for:

Events can also be used to invoke:

Incoming webhooks enable you to publish data from an external web service into an Ably channel by registering a new webhook endpoint in Ably and configuring it within an external service.

Stream Ably events to an external streaming or queuing service, or use Ably to distribute messages from a service such as Kafka to client devices.

Inbound streaming options are where an external service streams data to Ably.

The Kafka Connector extends Kafka’s streaming capabilities beyond your private network by enabling you to distribute messages to client devices.

Outbound streaming options are where Ably events are streamed to an external streaming or queuing service.

Events include messages published to a channel, all types of presence events emitted by a client’s presence status changes, the creation and closure of channels and changes in channel occupancy.

The services available to stream to are:

Webhooks