Real-time applications have become increasingly popular, and most of us use one or more real-time chat applications, such as WhatsApp.

One of the key challenges with these applications is efficiently managing user connections. We might have a large number of connected users, but these connections are idle most of the time.

Unfortunately, many services that offer WebSockets support (such as API Gateway, AppSync and IoT Core) charge for connection time. It means we have to pay to keep users connected, even when they aren’t actively sending or receiving messages.

This can become very inefficient as our application scales. And that’s where Momento Topics come in!

Real-time notifications have become a big part of modern applications. They let us push updates to users instantly and are essential part of messaging apps, social media and online games.

It’s one of the most common use cases for WebSockets.

But building a WebSockets system that can scale to millions of concurrent users is no small task!

In this guide, we will see how Momento Topics abstract away the hard parts of WebSockets and makes it easy to add real-time features to your application with a few lines of code.

Many apps have leaderboards nowadays. From games to fitness apps that display step counts among friends. It’s a common way to gamify applications!

However, building a scalable leaderboard service can be challenging. A common approach is to model a leaderboard as a Redis sorted set, but that means managing infrastructure and paying for uptime for the Redis cluster.

Only if there’s a truly serverless caching solution that gives you pay-per-use pricing ;-)