Minus 25 degrees Celsius outside the window – welcome back to the winter we remember from our childhood! Depending on your personal situation and available heating resources, you may love it or hate it, but the fact is that winter in the Northern Hemisphere this year still feels like the winters we had 20 years ago. Despite all the global warming concerns. And maybe this will be our last really freezing winter for the next decade, so don’t waste it!..
Servers, as you know, love cold. This is exactly the time when data centers all over the world produce useful heat and warm nearby cities. Our data centers in Groningen were probably happy to meet a cold January as well. However, one big state-of-the-art Juniper router located in Amsterdam decided deep in the night on January 8 that it could not handle 10 Mpps of unintended traffic and failed. Instead of simply going down, it ended up in a half-dead, half-alive state, which at some point broke traffic switching automation around it. This, in turn, caused partial connectivity issues in the flespi network and resulted in 210 seconds of downtime.
Putting lyrics aside, the failure point was on the upstream connectivity provider. It was quickly mitigated once diagnosed, despite the local time being around 3 am in the Netherlands. As a result of this incident, our January uptime was 99.9921%.
This month, we are continuing work on a number of interesting things. Some of them are purely internal – making our platform architecture better, stronger, and faster. Others will result in new functionality becoming available for your projects.
From a feature perspective, the most important ones are HTTP-FLV video streaming with sub-1-second latency as an alternative to the current HLS streaming, and parsing of .ddd tachograph files into JSON. We are very close to releasing both of these features – by the end of February, if everything goes well.
On the internal side, the focus remains on infrastructure and refactoring of core system components. But of course, also on the AI protocol engineering system that we are developing, testing, and improving every day. Whatever you see in protocol changelogs or published under my name on the forum, be sure it is produced by this platform – a fruitful partnership between a human and technology. Just a couple of weeks ago, it developed a new protocol completely from scratch up to the final stage. Once released, it waited for the device to connect, captured traffic, improved the implementation, created tests, monitored, and fixed the implementation a week later.
Oh boy, this is so much fun watching it work! And this will completely change the way we engineer our protocols. Instead of focusing on bits, bytes, packet parsing, and navigating bloated protocol documentation, we are now working with AI-based software platforms. Our task is to supply the right set of information into the context, in the right order, and establish links between the inputs we provide and the actions it performs.
To be honest, this is only related to protocol engineering. All the traditional components of our platform – database, MQTT broker, REST API services, and so on – are still developed in the classical human way. In certain cases, we use popular AI coding tools, but this is very limited and fully steered. For us, it is not about volume or release pace – quality is the only metric that matters, and we are not gonna sacrifice it in any way.
One of the important and interesting features released in January is that device commands were enhanced with condition, priority, and max_attempts fields. This unlocks a wide range of practical applications. For example, it is now much easier to implement your own tacho files download scheduler or ensure that an engine block command is attempted only when the vehicle is stopped.
We also published our own ranking of device manufacturers for 2025. Looking at the data from the last few months, and especially at January’s numbers that we will soon share on LinkedIn, I see some quite interesting trends. This view is, of course, limited to what we observe through flespi and may not fully reflect the entire market. Still, the numbers reveal notable patterns, and it will be interesting to see how long these trends continue.
That’s it for today. Keep yourself warm and enjoy winter – or summer, depending on which hemisphere you are in!