Electric Imp passed a major milestone last month: our imp Cloud processed a staggering five billion application-generated messages – messages passed between a device and its agent. That’s more than one message processed for every year the planet Earth has circled the Sun.
Due to the unique architecture of our system, we scale incredibly linearly, meaning we can deal with vast amounts of traffic while preserving the low latencies for which our service is well known. Our service-side latency – the time between a message being received and the agent or device responding in code – is well under a millisecond, an attribute of our platform that we’re really proud of and which is essential for responsive, fluid applications.
A year ago we announced we were re-writing our core server software in Erlang, a programming language designed from the ground up to build massively scalable systems with high availability. Given this week’s latest server deployment, that goal is now complete: the Electric Imp Cloud is now 100 per cent Erlang for our core applications, enabling us to deliver a faster, more resilient service to our customers and to grow seamlessly to handle the trillions of messages to come.
Roger Lipscombe
Backend Engineering Lead