Finally, hot summer is over and it’s time to start gathering the harvest in a new business season. Flespi platform finished August with the high uptime of 99.996% and a bunch of new features. More features are being in active development that will be released in upcoming autumn months.
- We started the month from upgrading all our 23 servers in 3 datacenters to the latest Debian Linux kernel release due to discovered vulnerability to the Linux TCP/IP stack. The vulnerability was published on August 6, Debian upgraded its kernel on August 7, right on August 7 we installed this patch and rebooted all our servers including routers with the new kernel at almost zero downtime. Comparing to our previous routers upgrade and reboot in March this time it was much smoother.
- Our REST API gateway services (marked as PROD system on the flespi architecture chart) can now automatically resend queries to internal systems when 5xx HTTP code comes from them and may delay reply up to a minute. It means that in case our internal subsystems are overloaded or are receiving upgrades, we try to handle this and will retry REST API request automatically finally returning to the caller a correct API response.
- We implemented the Google IoT stream capable of sending telematics data into the Google Cloud and described a sample use-case for cheap long-term storage for data from GPS trackers. Now we support
feeding of telemetry data from GPS devices to all major cloud services — Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure. - Last month we also discovered a nice MQTT dashboard utility for Android and implemented extremely high-tech use case of managing a light bulb from a smartphone using Concox GPS tracker. This example is based on sending commands over MQTT API, receiving state changes via flespi logs over MQTT, and managing Concox tracker output using device settings — same that are used in our universal configurator.
- On August 14-17 the flespi team as a part of a large Gurtam family took part in the Telematics 2018 conference and made an insightful survey for Gurtam users trying to understand their needs. Immediately after that, we published seven interesting use cases for Wialon users on how they can benefit from flespi technologies in their business.
- For those companies that would like to use flespi, but do not have sufficient expertise or resources, we published a list of our partners that may implement it. Feel free to contact any of the listed companies directly with information about your problem, they will do their best to find the solution.
- For users of our MQTT broker, we created a list of its special (non-standard) features. Two important things require your attention. First is the limitation to MQTT payload size of 60MB and second is the possibility to store messages in shared groups subscriptions if all sessions are offline. The last feature is required for stable load-balanced processing of high volume of MQTT messages using multiple receivers (workers). So far there is no MQTT broker on the market that implements it except flespi.
- In September we are visiting MWCA in Los Angeles and in October we will be at GITEX in UAE.
Here's what we plan to release in September:
possibility to seamlessly connect one GPS tracker to multiple GPS platforms at the same time for extended device testing, diagnostics, and migration between platforms;
live chat with the flespi support team embedded directly in flespi.io and as a separate application;
flespi sub-accounts management for users of our Commercial plan;
integration of flespi into Tableau dashboard as a data source.
And more nice features that I would like not to announce in advance. But they are great and we are working extremely hard to release them asap.
Wishing you as fruitful an autumn as we are going to have! Stay tuned for our news!