Introducing the Cloudize Notifications Platform Service

We're delighted to share that the Cloudize Notifications Platform Service is now GA.

A cloud platform's ability to reliably send email notifications through Email Service Providers (ESP) is a fundamental requirement of almost every system we've worked on. Virtually all ESPs offer well-crafted, restful APIs, which make integrations relatively easy. These, however, inadvertently create direct and difficult-to-break dependencies within the application code base, and migrating to an alternate ESP can be difficult.

Using an ESP for your email delivery is orders of magnitude better than trying to run your own email service reliably, but what happens when your ESP experiences a critical failure or outage of some sort? What effort would be required to refactor that dependency to utilise an alternate offering? For many, this would be an enormous blow not only in terms of development effort but also in terms of losing access to the historical transaction logs.

Over time, and in working with clients, it became clear that an abstraction of the functionality provided by ESPs would significantly improve this experience for customers, and that is precisely what we built.

The Cloudize Notifications Platform Service leverages a suite of upstream ESPs for the actual delivery of email but through a single API and webhooks layer. Historical transaction logs are stored and serviced directly within the service itself, so in the event that a client chooses to migrate to a new ESP, none of that historical context is lost, irrespective of which ESP handled the transaction. In addition, the ability to failover when an ESP is offline or experiencing an outage is no longer a code change requiring approvals and testing but rather a simple configuration change within the service, and in the future, we intend to provide a transparent failover capability, which will allow clients to define multiple ESP configurations, allowing the service to fail over on demand.

The Cloudize Notifications Platform Service greatly simplifies the ability for customers to reliably send emails through upstream ESPs through a single API interface (irrespective of the upstream ESPs used). This not only provides customers with a more robust capability but also breaks vendor lock-in and exposure to vendor outages.

Delivered as a cloud service (or on-prem for enterprise clients), clients have fewer services to manage, monitor and maintain, and development costs and complexity are both reduced significantly.

The service allows emails to be scheduled for immediate delivery or for delivery far into the future if required.

We'd love to know what you think of this innovation. Let us know.

If you'd like to read more about the Cloudize Notifications Service, you'll find more information about the service under our platform services page.