The Kubernetes Current Blog

To Engage Customers Online, You Need an Uber-like App Infrastructure

If you have ever hailed a ride through the Uber app and waited for the car to arrive, you may have found Uber’s ability to deliver highly accurate and near real-time updates of the arriving car’s location on a map very useful. Delivering this highly responsive and engaging experience to the user is no small feat. Arguably anyone can build a beautiful mobile app, but to make it as interactive as Uber’s app is most of the time, a number of obvious and not-so-obvious challenges have to be addressed relating to global network and server infrastructure, application runtime environments and so on. More on this here.

Uber and other behemoths (e.g. Netflix, YouTube and eBay) have made significant investments in time, manpower and capital to build out and maintain a global infrastructure footprint along with an easy-to-consume application runtime environment layered across said global infrastructure.

But if you are not a behemoth, and cannot afford your own global infrastructure, what are your alternatives?

Fortunately, platforms now exist that can empower the next amazing application to deliver a highly engaging, interactive experience by deploying their latency-sensitive microservices (packaged as containers) closer to end users. Rafay’s “CDN for Microservices” makes this possible. Any developer can instantly deliver the same location update experience that Uber has invested tens of millions of dollars to deliver.

In the following demo, we simulate a ride-sharing application using the Rafay platform.

Map

 

Running Apps Closer to Users

This demo underscores the benefits of running location update beacons for ride share-type applications closer to end users. For a passenger waiting for a vehicle to come pick her up, the location information appears to be updating much faster from an Edge location (green pin) than the information being received from the far-off location in Virginia (yellow pin). Rafay’s Programmable Edge platform empowers application owners to deliver highly interactive, personalized experiences, making it the ideal solution for ride-sharing, delivery and other location-aware applications that rely on real-time updates.

At Rafay, we operate a CDN-like infrastructure to automate the placement and ongoing operations of latency and location-sensitive workloads closer to users. Our service gives you the resources and instant scale of a global compute network without you having to build and maintain this complex, costly infrastructure in-house. If you would like to learn more about leveraging Rafay’s multi-tenant network to gain instant access to global locations, feel free to get in touch.

Author

Tags:
Blog , Containers , Edge Computing , low latency , Microservices

Trusted by leading companies