How PubNub Works

Users today not only expect an always-on experience from their applications, but a consistent one across all their devices as well. The most popular applications today – chat and social apps, document collaboration, multiplayer games, IoT, ride-sharing, the on-demand economy, etc. – are powered by realtime data. More applications are becoming realtime, and more users are becoming connected; top research firms such as Gartner and McKinsey predict a jump from the 6 billion connected devices we have worldwide today, to 20-30 billion by 2020. And these are conservative figures compared to estimates of other industry leaders such as Cisco and Intel, who project twice as many devices.

Traditional three-tier request/response architecture is failing to meet the scalability, latency, and reliability demands of modern data streaming applications. Architecting lasting realtime applications requires new ways of thinking about the network.

PubNub is a programmable network for developing realtime applications; an evolution from three-tier architecture, purpose-built to handle all the complexities of data streams. PubNub operates at the edge of the network to handle and apply logic to realtime data, thereby minimizing latency to 100 milliseconds or less worldwide, and guaranteeing reliability and scalability.

PubNub can be used to quickly push small messages to one or more devices (smartphones, tablets, desktops, microcontrollers, etc.) – essentially, just about any device that can make a TCP/IP connection to the internet – as well as back again, for bi-directional communication between devices. These messages can be used for human communication (like online chat), machine-to-machine control, IoT, geolocation, smart homes, financial data, multiplayer games, and a lot more.

PubNub knows that security, data ownership, and access control are critical to any realtime application – which is why we have built the entire Data Stream Network around these core tenets.

The PubNub DSN empowers developers to provide an out-of-the-box ‘always-on, realtime’ experience for their applications leaving Engineers, Architects, Developers, Product Managers, and others to focus on solving the actual business problems for their company and for their customers, rather than worrying about the network, infrastructure, and support resources needed to maintain their own Data Stream Network.