Using PubNub for Enterprise Bots Behind the Firewall

Building Cisco Webex bots and integrations that need access to behind-the-firewall resources is a challenge that regularly faces developers building Webex applications for internal use. Webex API events are delivered with an HTTP push model that requires your bot to be hosted on a web server that’s available on the public internet, but not all IT infrastructure allows for public web servers. To make this easier, we've worked with PubNub to create a reference architecture that allows enterprise applications to use PubNub's infrastructure to deploy bots and integrations behind the firewall.

PubNub is a publish and subscribe service that makes it easy to deliver events to applications in real-time, across a wide variety of network configurations. If the application can reach the internet, it can receive PubNub events. Today we're publishing a reference architecture, helper applications, and sample code that allow you to use PubNub as a transport to get your Webex events delivered behind the firewall, to mobile clients, or wherever you need them to go.

This reference architecture uses PubNub as your webhook URL, and PubNub will publish all webhooks to a PubNub channel. Your application subscribes to this channel, receiving all webhooks over this channel in real time. Minimal changes are required to your application, often only requiring a few lines of code to be added.

We've published a GitHub repository containing sample code, instructions for implementation, and helper applications. The repository also contains a plugin for Howdy Botkit that makes any Botkit application use PubNub.

Sign up for PubNub's free developer trial and download the sample code to get started.

If you're at Cisco Live in Orlando this week, stop by the PubNub booth in the Investment Village inside the World of Solutions to talk about this reference architecture and many other ways you can build real-time applications with PubNub. And stop at the theater near the Investment Village at 2:50pm on Monday June 11 to hear Webex Evangelist Phil Bellanti and PubNub CEO Todd Greene talk about this architecture.