Build real-time web apps with Azure Web PubSub—now generally available
Yulin Shi Principal Program Manager
Push data in real-time with Azure Web PubSub Service!
Real-time application scenarios such as live data updates, chat for streaming videos, interactive whiteboards for remote education, and IoT dashboards are helping businesses become more agile and more responsive to customers.
Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Azure Web PubSub, a fully managed WebSocket-based service that enables you to focus on building real-time web and mobile experiences. 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.
Available today with key improvements and enhanced security capabilities
The Azure Web PubSub service has been in preview since April, and now with the general availability of the Azure Web PubSub service, customers receive:
- Greater reliability. The general availability of the Azure Web PubSub service offers 99.9 percent availability with a service level agreement for production use.
- More regions. The Azure Web PubSub service is now available in the following regions: All United States and Canada regions, West Europe, North Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia East, and Japan East and West. Plus, in the coming months, we will add additional regions.
The service also offers important security capabilities including:
- Azure Active Directory support to help customers protect and govern access with single sign-on and simplify access to apps from anywhere.
- Private endpoints support to allow clients in a virtual network to securely access the Azure Web PubSub service.
Developers will also benefit from these key improvements in the generally available release:
- More REST APIs to enable adding users to a group and close user, group, and hub connections.
- Azure CLI improvements to enable users to directly establish WebSocket clients and send messages or manage connections.
- Subprotocol improvements include binary support and more metadata in subprotocol to enable more pub/sub scenarios.
- Anonymous connect to enable customers to use their own authentication logic (for example, GraphQL subscription support).
Integration with additional Azure services
We’re providing triggers and bindings so customers can integrate Azure Web PubSub with Azure Functions more easily. Serverless applications have many unique use cases including live data updates and other real-time scenarios. With the Azure Functions binding, the Azure Web PubSub Service can be used seamlessly in a serverless environment on Azure. Check out a quick tutorial for creating a serverless notification app with Azure Functions binding.
Besides Azure Functions integration, we’re also providing integration with other Azure services like Azure Static Web Apps, Azure API Management, Azure Application Gateway, and Azure Monitor so customers can build end-to-end solutions with Azure.
In addition, we will continue to offer a free tier for trial and prototyping.
Try Azure Web PubSub Service today
If you want to learn more about the Azure Web PubSub service, give it a try. You can get started for free, and we have plenty of Azure Web PubSub documentation and a simple QuickStart guide, as well as introductory videos. If you have any questions, feature requests, or you want to open a support ticket, you can provide feedback through the documentation listed or contact us directly.
We can’t wait to see what you’ll build with the Azure Web PubSub service!
