Real-time application scenarios such as chat for streaming videos, interactive whiteboards for remote education, and IoT dashboards are becoming ever more popular. Businesses are keen to build such applications for enhanced user experiences and real-time interactions with end customers.

Today, we are announcing the preview of the 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 and is supported by all major browsers as well as web servers. Azure Web PubSub enables you to use WebSockets and the publish-subscribe pattern to easily build real-time web applications, like live monitoring dashboards, cross-platform live chat, real-time location on maps, and more.

Figure 1: Azure Web PubSub service usage scenarios

Fully managed, globally available

Real-time scenarios often require high-frequency data flows and large quantities of concurrent connections between the client and server. For example, a finance app to visualize market data may need up to 100,000 connections and live data with low latency in milliseconds. A non-trivial infrastructure setup is required to get such functionality up and running at scale. To implement a WebSocket-based real-time experience, a developer would first need to set up infrastructure for