Since its introduction five years ago, SignalR has grown to be one of the most popular real-time connection technologies around the world. As applications that use SignalR scale, managing and scaling a SignalR server can become quite a bit of work.
Today, we’re announcing the general availability (GA) of the Azure SignalR Service, a fully managed SignalR service that enables you to focus on building real-time web experiences without worrying about setting up, hosting, scaling, or load balancing your SignalR server. The Azure SignalR Service supports existing libraries for ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET, Java, and JavaScript clients, opening this service to a broad array of developers.
Available today
The SignalR Service has been in public preview since May, and with the general availability of the Azure SignalR Service, customers get:
- More regions. SignalR Service is now available in the following regions: US East, US East 2, US Central, US West, US West 2, Canada East, West Europe, North Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia East, and Japan East. And in the coming months we will add more regions.
- More reliability. The Azure SignalR Service GA offers 99.9% availability with a service level agreement for production use.
- More capacity. During its preview, the SignalR Service was limited to 10K connections in the Standard Tier. With GA, it increases to 100K connections per instance. Through sharding or partitioning, users can configure multiple instances to handle an even larger scale.
Of course, we will continue to provide Free Tier for trial and prototyping.
The generally available service also supports more REST APIs to enable adding users to a group, and to improve the broadcast scenario support and support for port 443 (secure HTTP).
Along with the new capabilities, we’re also previewing an Azure Functions binding. Serverless applications have many unique use cases including many real-time scenarios. With the Azure Functions binding, the Azure SignalR Service can be used seamlessly in a serverless environment on Azure. The Azure Functions binding is open source and hosted by Microsoft Azure in GitHub repository.
Netrix immediately saw the benefits of Azure SignalR Service and became an early adopter while it was in preview. Netrix built a customized cost-estimation system for the automotive industry and used Azure SignalR Service to add a new capability that notifies browsers of completed commands in real time.
As Lars Kemmann, Netrix Solution Architect, put it, “By using Azure SignalR Service, we gain the best practices of built-in security and scalability—a comfort for our clients and a huge win for us.”
Of course, Azure SignalR Service lends itself to much more than complex business applications in the automotive industry. When GranDen, a Taiwan based gaming company, wanted to bring real-time communication and a new gaming concept involving Augmented Reality to market to enrich player experience, they turned to Azure SignalR Service. As Isak Pao, GranDen's CTO put it, “We reached out to competing cloud service providers. No one else offered us something comparable to Azure SignalR Service. Without it, we’d have to build so many virtual machines that we wouldn’t be able to leverage WebSocket in real time.” See the GranDen case study for more information.
Try Azure SignalR Service today
If you want to learn more about SignalR Service, give it a try. You can get started for free, and of course we have plenty of documentation and a simple quickstart. If you have any questions, feature request, or you want to open an issue ticket, please reach out through any channel listed above.
We can’t wait to see what you’ll build with Azure SignalR Service!