Ably Realtime, the creators of the cloud-based real time streaming data platform, recently announced its membership of the OpenAPI Initiative (OAI). Ably’s membership in OIA will help users of Ably’s platform participate more easily in the real time data supply chain, while enabling the wider OAI community to benefit from Ably’s expertise and lessons learned from its broad customer base, which spans technology, logistics, sport and more.
Embracing the OpenAPI specification will enable Ably customers to define their data more quickly and make it easier to discover, thanks to the data definitions being machine-readable.
OAI principles augment Ably’s work in three main directions:
1) Simplifying real time data distribution
OpenAPI membership represents the latest step in Ably’s mission to simplify the distribution of streaming data by taking care of everything under the hood, including business-to-business exchange of data and “last mile” delivery to end consumers. This frees organisations to focus on sharing and monetizing their information.
Matthew O’Riordan, CEO at Ably, said: “Joining the OpenAPI Initiative sits perfectly with our ethos of using open protocols and standards. This will make it easier for our customers to define how people consume their data using well-understood specifications, which will ultimately make it more discoverable, usable and valuable to them.”
2) Benefiting the wider developer community
Four years (and 50,000 hours) in the making, Ably’s product was designed with developers in mind. According to Ably’s CEO:
“We want to help people liberate their data by tackling the common challenges they face when trying to distribute it. Our platform already looks after the infrastructure and protocol interoperability, so working with the OAI and incorporating these specifications into our services additionally takes care of the data definition and discovery.”
O’Riordan also revealed the broader significance of Ably’s OAI involvement:
“As our customers use the OpenAPI specifications to define their data, we’ll help them address any issues they encounter, and feed these learnings back into the specs, so the whole community benefits.
“Equally, our in-house team is excited about learning best practices from the OAI community, which we can, in turn, pass on to the community of developers who use Ably.”
Ole Lensmar, chairman of the OAI, added: “The OAI is super-excited to have Ably on board – real-time data delivery is key to providing competitive user experiences to end users and Ably’s recognized leadership and expertise in this area will be of great benefit to both the technical evolution of the OpenAPI Spec and the adoption of the spec for describing real-time APIs across all verticals.”
3) Promoting open innovation in the real time space
Ably’s membership of the OAI dovetails with the launch of the Ably Open Data Streaming Program (ODSP), and the Ably Hub, a central source for data streams. Under the ODSP, anyone producing streams of data can use the Ably Data Stream Exchange (DSX) platform to host and distribute it for free, provided they make it freely available for others to use. These open streams of data will be available via the newly launched Ably Hub, an app-store-like portal where developers can browse and subscribe to real time data feeds.
More information about the Open Data Streaming Program is available on the Ably website at https://go.ably.io/open-data-streaming-program.
To find out more about Ably Realtime, the Data Stream Exchange (DSX) and the Ably Hub, go to https://www.ably.io/dsx.
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Ably Realtime is a cloud-based realtime data platform. This allows internet-enabled devices — like computers, phones, servers or Internet of Things sensors — to stream data to each other in milliseconds. Uniquely, Ably Realtime’s Data Stream Exchange (DSX) brings enterprise-scale realtime APIs for businesses that need to share data in real time, and for developers building realtime services. This is offered with unrivaled 100% service availability, message delivery guarantees and low latencies globally. Find out more at https://www.ably.io/dsx.