A WebSocket is a persistent bi-directional communication channel between a client (e.g. a browser) and a backend service. In contrast with HTTP request/response connections, websockets can transport any number of protocols and provide server-to-client message delivery without polling.
WebSockets are exciting for developers because they allow for bidirectional real-time communication between servers and clients.
WebSockets establish TCP-style connections in a browser-compatible fashion using HTTP during initial setup. Messages over websockets can be provided in any protocol, freeing the application from the sometimes unnecessary overhead of HTTP requests and responses (including headers, cookies, and other artifacts). But most critical is the ability to deliver downstream (server-to-client) messages to connected clients. In the browser, for instance, the same thing was once only possible by polling a server resource, which is a comparatively racy, high-latency, and bandwidth-intensive affair.
WebSockets are available on many platforms, including the most common browsers and mobile devices. They're often applied to solve problems of millisecond-accurate state synchronization and publish-subscribe messaging, both of which leverage Websockets' provision for downstream pushes. A challenge of operating a WebSocket-based system is the maintenance of a stateful gateway on the backend. A WebSocket is erected by making a common HTTP request to that server with an Upgrade
header, which the server (after authenticating and authorizing the client) should confirm in its response. After this, the connection remains established between that physical client-server pair; if at some point the service needs to be redeployed or the load redistributed, its WebSocket connections needs to be re-established.
At Twilio, we use WebSockets to connect our SDKs to our backend in several of our products: