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Real-Time Data & WebSockets

The infrastructure that moves live data from a device to a dashboard before it goes stale.

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Overview

What this solves

Most dashboards labeled 'real-time' are actually polling every few seconds and calling it live. That's fine for some use cases and a real problem for others — a fleet dashboard, an industrial monitoring system, or a drone telemetry feed where a stale reading isn't just inconvenient, it's the whole system failing at its one job. Real-time data infrastructure is the work of building the actual pipeline: devices publishing over MQTT, a processing layer that reacts to events as they happen, and WebSocket connections that push updates to a dashboard the instant there's something new to show.

We get called in most often on systems that already exist and are already polling — an app that refreshes every 5 or 10 seconds and everyone's quietly accepted that as 'real-time' because rebuilding the transport layer felt like a bigger project than it needed to be. In practice, moving from polling to an event-driven MQTT/WebSocket pipeline is usually a contained piece of work layered onto an existing system, not a rewrite — and it's often the single change that makes a dashboard feel like a genuinely live system instead of one that's a few seconds behind and hoping nobody notices.

Capabilities

What we build

MQTT ingestion at scale

Handling data from many devices publishing simultaneously over lightweight, constrained-network-friendly messaging.

WebSocket-driven dashboards

Persistent connections that push updates to the browser the moment new data arrives, no polling delay.

Event-driven processing

Serverless processing that reacts to incoming data in real time rather than batching it for later.

Alerting & fan-out

Getting the right event to the right channel — dashboard, app, or on-call notification — immediately.

Durable queuing

Queue-backed pipelines so a burst of data doesn't get dropped between ingestion and processing.

Migration from polling architectures

Layering an event-driven pipeline onto an existing polling-based system without a full rewrite, usually the fastest path from 'looks real-time' to actually real-time.

Tech Stack

Built on infrastructure made for real-time data

MQTT

The standard protocol for lightweight, constrained-device data publishing.

WebSockets

Persistent, bidirectional connections that make dashboards actually real-time.

AWS Lambda

Event-driven compute that scales with data volume without idle server cost.

SQS

Durable queuing between ingestion and processing for burst resilience.

SNS

Fan-out alerting to multiple destinations from a single event.

DynamoDB

High-throughput storage built for time-series and event data.

Who This Is For

Built for teams already in motion

Teams with existing 'real-time' dashboards that aren't

Polling-based systems that need to become genuinely event-driven.

Hardware & IoT product teams

Devices in the field generating data that needs to reach a usable interface with minimal delay.

Operations teams monitoring live systems

Any system where the value of the data drops sharply the moment it's stale.

This is the connective tissue underneath our drone, live-tracking, and robotics work — the same MQTT/WebSocket/event-driven pipeline, applied wherever live data needs to reach a person or a system fast enough to matter.

If there's one question worth asking about an existing 'real-time' system before assuming it needs a rebuild, it's this: is the client actually pushing updates, or is the browser asking on a timer and hoping for something new? Most of the time it's the second one, and most of the time the fix is smaller than it sounds — a transport-layer change, not a full-system rewrite.

FAQ

Common questions

What's the difference between WebSockets and just polling faster?
Polling faster still means the client is asking on a schedule and paying the overhead of repeated requests, most of which return nothing new. WebSockets keep a connection open so updates push through the moment there's something to send — lower latency and less wasted traffic.
Do you build the whole pipeline, or just the dashboard?
The whole pipeline — ingestion, processing, transport, and the dashboard that consumes it. A real-time dashboard is only as good as the pipeline feeding it.
Can this integrate with hardware/devices we already have deployed?
Yes, most projects build around existing devices rather than requiring new hardware.
How much latency can you actually achieve?
Depends on the network and device constraints, but the architecture (MQTT + WebSockets + event-driven processing) is built to minimize latency at every step rather than accept it as a given.
Is this overkill for a smaller system with just a few devices?
No — the same architecture scales down cleanly. A small deployment doesn't need less correct infrastructure, it just needs less of it, and MQTT/WebSocket pipelines are lightweight enough to make sense even at small scale.
What happens if the WebSocket connection drops?
The client reconnects and resyncs state rather than silently going stale — a dropped connection is treated as an event to recover from, not a failure mode that's ignored until someone notices the dashboard froze.

Have a project in mind?

Tell us what you're building, and we'll scope the software around it.

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