Announcing Functions and Endpoints

We have two announcements we’re excited to share with you!

BLOCKS is Now Functions

First, we’ve renamed PubNub BLOCKS to Functions. Our pre-built Functions and integrations will still be available in our branded BLOCKS Catalog.

As you may know, Functions is serverless compute directly at the edge of the network, which executes business logic on messages in-flight as they are streamed through PubNub.  With a single click, developers have access to the Functions they need to build and operate their real-time app – without worrying about deploying, maintaining, and scaling server infrastructure.

Functions is built specifically to enhance real-time apps running on the PubNub Data Stream Network:

• Deploys functions in milliseconds to 15 points of presence worldwide
• Scales automatically with usage
• Requires no start-up time; your functions always run “hot”
• Backed by 99.999% SLA’s
• Adds minimal latency to low-latency data stream applications

Endpoints

Second, we are introducing webhook integration into Functions with Endpoints! Endpoints makes Functions available to anything capable of making an HTTP request, without the need to publish to a channel via one of our 70+ SDKs.

Creating a webhook is super easy. Simply select “On Request” as the event type when creating a new Function, and specify the desired URI path:

With the ability to deploy secure Functions and REST endpoints in the network through the click of a button, developers can quickly:

• Transform, filter, aggregate, and re-route messages with custom business logic
• Integrate 3rd party services for things like sentiment analysis, geolocation, and machine learning
• Build massive-scale social apps, online multiplayer games, or IoT use cases
• Store and retrieve stateful data for things like polls and vote aggregation using PubNub’s globally replicated Key/Value database
• Implement authentication models such as OAUTH
• Deliver advanced chat functionality such as @mentions and language translation in a few lines of code
• Create chatbots for any real-time app or messaging platform

For further learning, check out the Functions and Endpoints documentation or our Facebook Messenger chatbot tutorial.

We’ll keep you posted as we release more Endpoints webinars and tutorials in the near future.