Four months in the current year have passed, and it’s a good moment to review how close we are to the implementation of our roadmap for 2023. In April, we delivered one more feature from this list — we activated the production use of an additional datacenter where our services are located. From that moment, all flespi domain names that you use are resolved into at least two different IP addresses, each of which is located in a separate infrastructure. Although it will take at least a year from now to gather the actual experience and adopt our top-level control system to switch datacenters ON/OFF in smart automatic mode, the system is fully operational now with manual controlling gears. So far everything is running smoothly with all data being constantly replicated between datacenters. Once we gain more experience with the platform operating in that mode and set up more automation within its different components, I will publish an article with the overview of how everything is organized.
Before bringing the new datacenter in live mode, we experienced quite a long 853 seconds blackout of our IP address for REST API services due to a DDoS attack. Because of that, our monthly uptime in April dropped to 99.9671%. We are still investigating the reasons for such a long blackout on the provider’s side, however we immediately organized our own protection mechanism to prevent similar cases in the future. Actually, such a blackout was one of the reasons for us to bring the new datacenter into the production mode because if it had been running by that moment, the impact of the IP address blackout might not have been so bad with just a part of requests being dropped.
- Another important feature from our roadmap is the Automation module. In the end of March we released webhooks and in April I wrote an article about them followed by the documentation in our KB.
- The next feature we will be working on is video telematics. We will start working on it in the middle of May and I expect that by the end of this summer we will have video telematics via API with live-streaming and storage available for our users. There is no guarantee though, since this is an untapped area for us.
- Among other achievements in April, I would like to highlight two more. First, we reached 650,000 registered devices and are keeping on our track to the first million. Second is that our company received ISO 9001:2015 and ISO/IEC27001:2013 certificates for processes in development, distribution and support of software solutions for telematics and GPS monitoring and control. Just an indication of our attitude towards information security standards existing nowadays.
- A small but useful update to make your communication with the flespi team better, we added the possibility to pin messages in built-in chat.
- We integrated two more GPS manufacturers into flespi: Jointech and Digital Matter. And made an overview of the most popular manufacturers for us in 2022: Queclink and Teltonika.
And a little bit more information on what you can expect from us in the upcoming month.
- On May 11, Sergei Leuchanka, VP of Business Development @ flespi, will co-host a webinar with our hardware partner Teltonika Telematics called "Quality Telematics via API in North America". It will be a short 30 minutes session that will cover US and Canada certified Teltonika hardware and flespi's capabilities to enable easy API-based integration with those devices. Please register here, if interested.
- Shortly after that, our developer Jan Bartnitsky will be hosting a webinar on the topic of "Flespi Concepts and Interface" on May 17 at 12:00 UTC. Jan frequently conducts screen sharing sessions with flespi customers and leads, and even those who have been using flespi for years, often find themselves getting excited and asking questions like "How did you do that?", "Can I record this?", or "I didn't know that was possible!"
The webinar will focus on covering the basic flespi concepts through a show-and-tell format, demonstrating hidden tweaks on how to work with flespi efficiently, and showing some techniques for investigating common problems.
The link to join the webinar will be made available closer to the event.
UPD: the recording of the webinar will be available on our YouTube channel.
Finally, on the last week of this spring (May 22-26) we will take part in a so-called Gurtam Big Week event when all Gurtam employees from all over the world will come to Lithuania to share their work experience, gather new knowledge, do internal networking, and of course have fun and relax after so much work is done last months. We will do our best to reply to your inquiries in the support chat as usual within minutes, however we may be slow to respond sometimes during the event.
Wish you a nice weather wherever you are, and please consider attending at least one of the two webinars above to enrich your flespi or hardware knowledge!