How Clubhouse Scaled Real-Time Conversations in Live Rooms
With PubNub, Clubhouse:
Saved the equivalent of 3 engineers’ development time over 6 months, allowing them to focus on building their core product features instead of developing their own backend-to-client communication infrastructure.
Easily solved challenging infrastructure issues surrounding scalability and traffic spikes.
Reduced the need for their infrastructure team to be in the critical path of many launches, saving an estimated 10% of the time required to deliver features that rely on real-time messaging.
“The biggest advantage of partnering with PubNub is their expertise in real-time messaging at scale, allowing us to concentrate on building our core features.”
– Mohammad Almalkawi, Chief Technology Officer at Clubhouse.
Meet Clubhouse
Everyone deserves a life filled with rich and meaningful friendships. This is the mission of Clubhouse, the pioneering social audio platform. Clubhouse quickly became popular for its unique approach to real-time voice conversations, which allows people all over the world to come together to hang out, talk, and make new friends.
Because the platform serves millions of users around the globe, and their traffic tends to spike regularly; Clubhouse needed real-time guarantees for communication between the backend and their users, as well as the ability to meet strict latency requirements. A robust, scalable infrastructure that could provide reliable, low-latency communication was paramount to Clubhouse’s success.
Powering real-time conversations
To overcome these challenges, Clubhouse turned to PubNub. “We have been using PubNub from the very beginning because we had great success with them in previous products,” said Mohammad Almalkawi, CTO of Clubhouse.
Setting up PubNub was straightforward. It started with reading PubNub’s comprehensive API documentation, followed by collaborative design meetings with their team and continuous support. “The onboarding process was pretty intuitive and much easier than with other vendors we evaluated before,” said Almalkawi.
Clubhouse’s users connect to PubNub to receive messages when they are in live rooms. These can include notifications about who is raising their hand to speak or who has changed their photo while in the room. Additionally, Clubhouse uses a PubNub webhook to notify their backend whenever a user joins or leaves a room, allowing their backend to stay up-to-date. Clubhouse’s CTO knew they did not want to invest in building their own backend-to-client communication channel, since that would distract the team from solving core product problems.
Fast, flexible, and future-proof
With PubNub, Clubhouse gained a resilient, reliable infrastructure that could handle rapid growth. PubNub’s real-time capabilities ensure that users experience lag-free interactions—even during peak traffic hours. Users are alerted by instant notifications, giving them up-to-date information about the state of the live room and other users joining the room, providing them with a truly live experience and ultimately supporting user retention and satisfaction.
The return on investment was clear: Clubhouse could focus on delivering engaging, real-time conversations without the technical hurdles of managing the underlying real-time infrastructure.
“We are very confident in PubNub’s ability to scale and work reliably, based on their track record with us over the past few years,” said Almalkawi.
According to Almalkawi, Clubhouse saved the equivalent of 3 engineers’ development time over 6 months, along with an additional engineer who would have been continuously assigned to monitor and maintain the system by leveraging PubNub.
Furthermore, running on PubNub reduced the need for their infrastructure team to be in the critical path of many launches, saving an estimated 10% of the time required to deliver features that rely on real-time messaging. “This was possible because we did not need to worry about the real-time messaging infrastructure's ability to scale with added load and use cases, as PubNub handles it all seamlessly,” said Almalkawi.
Innovating and scaling with PubNub’s real-time capabilities
PubNub provided Clubhouse with the high-performing, low-latency infrastructure required to deliver uninterrupted, real-time conversations for users around the globe. Looking forward, Clubhouse plans to continue leveraging PubNub’s advanced real-time features to enhance user interactions. As Clubhouse grows, PubNub’s platform will provide the support needed to innovate, scale, and engage users in new ways.
“PubNub has been a stable and reliable partner for us. They have made our job easier by managing the scaling demands of our spiky traffic, ensuring quick reactions to fluctuations in traffic.”
Discover how PubNub can transform your real-time application experience—empowering your business with the scalability and reliability needed to drive meaningful engagement. Contact PubNub today to learn more.