Overview Socket.IO on Azure

Socket.IO is a widely popular open-source library for real-time messaging between clients and a server. Managing stateful and persistent connections between clients and a server is often a source of frustration for Socket.IO users. The problem is more acute when multiple Socket.IO instances are spread across servers.

Azure provides a fully managed cloud solution for Socket.IO. This support removes the burden of deploying, hosting, and coordinating Socket.IO instances for developers. Development teams can then focus on building real-time experiences by using familiar APIs from the Socket.IO library.

Simplified architecture

This feature removes the need for an "adapter" server component when scaling out a Socket.IO app, allowing the development team to reap the benefits of a simplified architecture.

Benefits over hosting a Socket.IO app yourself

The following table shows the benefits of using the fully managed solution from Azure.

Item	Hosting a Socket.IO app yourself	Using Socket.IO on Azure
Deployment	Customer managed	Azure managed
Hosting	Customer needs to provision enough server resources to serve and maintain persistent connections	Azure managed
Scaling connections	Customer managed by using a server-side component called an adapter	Azure managed with more than 100,000 client connections out of the box
Uptime guarantee	Customer managed	Azure managed with more than 99.9 percent uptime
Enterprise-grade security	Customer managed	Azure managed
Ticket support system	Not applicable	Azure managed

When you host a Socket.IO app yourself, clients establish WebSocket or long-polling connections directly with your server. Maintaining such stateful connections places a heavy burden on your Socket.IO server. This burden limits the number of concurrent connections and increases messaging latency.

A common approach to meeting the concurrency and latency challenge is to scale out to multiple Socket.IO servers. Scaling out requires a server-side component called an adapter, like the Redis adapter that the Socket.IO library provides. However, such an adapter introduces an extra component that you need to deploy and manage. It also requires you to write extra code logic to get things to work properly.

With Socket.IO on Azure, you're freed from handling scaling issues and implementing code logic related to using an adapter.

Same programming model

To migrate a self-hosted Socket.IO app to Azure, you add only a few lines of code. There's no need to change the rest of the application code. In other words, the programming model remains the same, and the complexity of managing a real-time app is reduced.

Quickstart for Socket.IO users

Migrate a self-hosted Socket.IO app to Azure