Twilio

Nexmo vs Twilio ?

Back in the early days at SmartZip Analytics, that evaluation had - for whatever reason - been made by Product Management. Some developers might have been consulted, but we hadn't made the final call and some key engineering aspects of it were omitted.

When revamping the platform, I made sure to flip the decision process how it should be. Business provided an input but Engineering lead the way and has the final say on all implementation matters. My engineers and I decided on re-evaluating the criteria and vendor selection. Not only did we need SMS support, but were we not thinking about #VoiceAndSms support as the use cases evolved.

Also, on an engineering standpoint, SDK mattered. Nexmo didn't have any. Twilio did. No-one would ever want to re-build from scratch integration layers vendors should naturally come up with and provide their customers with.

Twilio won on all fronts. Including costs and implementation timelines. No-one even noticed the vendor switch.

Many years later, Twilio demonstrated its position as a leader by holding conferences in the Bay Area, announcing features like Twilio Functions. Even acquired Authy which we also used for 2FA. Twilio's growth has been amazing. Its recent acquisition of SendGrid continues to show it.

Recently we finished long research on chat tool for our students and mentors. In the end we picked Mattermost Team Edition as the cheapest and most feature complete option. We did consider building everything from scratch and use something like Pusher or Twilio on a backend, but then we would have to implement all the desktop and mobile clients and all the features oursevles. Mattermost gave us flexible API, lots of built in or easy to install integrations and future-proof feature set. We are still integrating it with our main platform but so far the team, existing mentors and students are very happy.

Firebase Cloud Firestore Cloud Functions for Firebase Google App Engine React React Native React Native Firebase NativeBase Twilio Dwolla.js Yarn fastlane Bitbucket Slack LastPass

delayed_job is a great Rails background job library for new projects, as it only uses what you already have: a relational database. We happily used it during the company’s first two years.

But it started to falter as our web and database transactions significantly grew. Our app interacted with users via SMS texts sent inside background jobs. Because the delayed_job daemon ran every couple seconds, this meant that users often waited several long seconds before getting text replies, which was not acceptable. Moreover, job processing was done inside AWS Elastic Beanstalk web instances, which were already under stress and not meant to handle jobs.

We needed a fast background job system that could process jobs in near real-time and integrate well with AWS. Sidekiq is a fast and popular Ruby background job library, but it does not leverage the Elastic Beanstalk worker architecture, and you have to maintain a Redis instance.

We ended up choosing active-elastic-job, which seamlessly integrates with worker instances and Amazon SQS. SQS is a fast queue and you don’t need to worry about infrastructure or scaling, as AWS handles it for you.

We noticed significant performance gains immediately after making the switch.

#BackgroundProcessing

SMS based notifications for the dev team to be notified of errors, signups, etc. Twilio

We use Twilio extensively for voice call routing, for texting. We, in fact, use it for MMS messaging as of recently...We do number masking. So the personal shopper never has your actual number, you call the Twilio number and it routes you intelligently to the customer. And vice-versa. Twilio