Diffusion 6.5 Is Released: Build Distributed, Scalable Applications with Enterprise-Grade Access Control

We’re excited to announce that the latest update to the Diffusion™ Intelligent Data Mesh is now available, both for download and as a Diffusion Cloud service.

Diffusion 6.5 is full of ground-breaking features that make it easier than ever to develop and maintain advanced real-time applications. We’ve been guided in our development by the real-world needs and challenges of our enterprise customers across multiple sectors.

Build Distributed, Scalable Applications

Real-time streaming between remote servers: easy configuration, powerful data transformation

Today’s applications often require replicating real-time data between separate clusters of servers. Whether your servers are separated by a firewall or an ocean, Diffusion’s unique delta data streaming can keep data sets synchronized with astonishingly low latency, regardless of geographic distance or network quality.

Diffusion 6.5 radically expands the possibilities of remote servers with a new remote topic view feature.

Remote topic views enable you to configure remote server links dynamically, either manually or using API calls, with no need to edit configuration files. Your application can reconfigure its own network topology on the fly.

What’s more, remote topic views can be combined with the existing topic view capabilities to process and transform data.  So instead of just replicating data 1:1 from a remote server, you can filter out irrelevant data, localize values, or even completely restructure the data to be exactly what the local server requires – all in real time.

Application messaging within clusters

As well as real-time streaming, Diffusion offers a powerful request-response messaging system for asynchronous delivery of application messages.

Now request-response messaging is cluster-aware, enabling automatic message routing within a cluster including delivery acknowledgment. Messages can be targeted to individual client sessions or groups of sessions via property-based addressing.

A huge benefit of this feature is that only a single message handler needs to be connected to each cluster for message delivery. This improves resilience in the event of failure and enables you to add servers dynamically to horizontally scale a cluster without needing to create and connect extra clients.

Enterprise-Grade Access Control

Dynamic, scalable security permissions

Diffusion’s security model for access to streaming data and application messages has been overhauled for extreme scalability. Configurations with millions of path-based permission rules are now supported, enabling fine-grained access control to the level of each user having individually tailored access if required.

We’ve streamlined the security configuration rules. Any change to the permissions for reading data is now applied instantly. Your application can dynamically reconfigure access to streaming data for hundreds of thousands of connected users, with no effect on system performance.

Delayed data feeds

At Push Technology, delay is rarely our objective: Diffusion is engineered to deliver data with incredibly low latency.

However, for some applications you may want to introduce a controlled delay. For example, suppose your customers pay for access to the latest price data, and you want to offer a free demo service that shows prices with a five-minute delay.

You can create a delayed data feed like that with delayed topic views, another addition to Diffusion’s powerful topic view system. The delayed feed will exactly reproduce changes to the source, including changes to data values and structure, with a delay you choose: from a second to many days. And of course, you can also process and transform the delayed feed.

Cross-cluster session management

Now more client control functions are cluster-aware, meaning that your application or administrators can easily control and manage user-specific authorization, properties, and connections, providing full operational oversight regardless of scale.

For example, it’s now easy to close all user sessions matching specified properties, across a whole Diffusion cluster.

And much more…

Diffusion 6.5 also features a completely redesigned web-based management console, improved cluster readiness settings, support for JavaScript web workers to power multi-tab applications, smarter delta calculation and many other improvements. See What’s New in the manual for more details.

Want to go deeper? Some of our engineering team members have written these in-depth posts explaining more about how Diffusion is improving:

Security Changes in Diffusion 6.5 by Push Technology’s CTO Phil Aston

Remote Topic Views – Beyond Fan-out by our Product Architect, Paddy Walsh

More Cluster-Aware Features In Diffusion 6.4 and 6.5 by Server Engineer John Ziamos

The Diffusion Management Console, Past and Present by Software Engineer Stephen Cox (who did the lion’s share of the work on the new console)