1 September, 2022

August 2022 change log

Major flespi improvements in August 2022.

August was the hottest month in 2022 so far. Despite the soaring electricity prices due to the war in Ukraine, our servers and networking equipment of our infrastructure stayed cooled and fully operational, which gave us one more month with unbeatable 100% uptime.

Our data center is located in Groningen, Netherlands and does not prevent new homes construction opposite to similar data centers in West London for example. And of course as any other provider that relies on computing resources, we also suffer from soaring energy prices because servers consume a lot of energy. But in that war for resources, we have a very competitive advantage. Our microservices developed in plain C programming language are super lightweight and effective and consume less computing resources per each function. We chose this track initially in order to achieve the best possible performance with legacy servers hardware. But now together with performance we've got an energy efficient solution on top of all. Crazy things are happening, nobody thought about electricity prices 5 years ago when we just started flespi.

In August Gurtam held the Telematics Vilnius conference and in case you missed it, please take a look at the inspirational Jan Bartnitsky speech on the promising business areas in which the classic transportation industry TSPs can easily enter with their existing expertise. With expected worldwide recession in the following years and soaring energy and oil prices, it can be a great opportunity for our clients to grow much quicker than in previous years. Most solutions that are built on top of flespi are anti-crisis, targeted to improve business operations and cut costs - exactly what will be in high demand soon. Our experience proves that. And this allows us to operate confidently in anticipation of the future.

  • The most important thing in August was deprecation of commands in channels. We decided to keep channels only for data ingestion, while any two-way communication and remote control via API will be available with registered devices only. We need this step to remove ambiguity both in the API and in the flespi internals.
  • Those who operate their platforms in Google Cloud should be aware that Google recently announced deprecation of its IoT Core service starting from August 16, 2023. We quickly implemented an alternative stream to Google Cloud by leveraging Google Pub/Sub service and asking our users to schedule transition to a new stream type.
  • flespi.io received a large set of updates and I invite our users to revisit the INFO tab for devices, channels, streams and other flespi entities. There we gathered a lot of useful resources that can help in your operations with this entity - changelogs, list of MQTT topics available, list of parameters that you may expect from device or channel, subaccounts and channels hierarchy, integrated REST API docs and so on.
  • We integrated two new protocols: segway-ninebot and voi. Both to enhance our application in the micromobility sphere.

And last but not least — we are working on the device groups to provide simple but powerful automation services for our users. We expect it to be delivered in September or October this year.