Intro
For a FinTech course group assignment, our team built a small cloud‑deployed market‑data SaaS prototype. We used Python stock‑market APIs and WebSockets to ingest continuous tick‑based real‑time market streams.
To get our prototype working quickly, we hard‑coded a fixed heartbeat ping interval. Our initial assumption was simple: regularly sending ping packets would keep the WebSocket connection alive.
Everything worked fine locally, but issues surfaced after deployment to cloud lab environments. Unlike controlled local‑network conditions, public internet connections suffer from random jitter. We found cases where the market feed had already stopped silently, yet our application kept running, treating stale data as valid input for simulation and aggregation logic.
This experience drove home a key observation. Heartbeats are an easy‑overlooked detail for WebSocket long‑lived connections, but they directly determine data continuity and overall reliability for FinTech market‑data applications.
