In Belarus, July can be very hot. But this year we were lucky to enjoy mostly warm and sometimes cool mid-summer and escape the extreme temperatures from which Western Europe suffered a lot.
Using this wonderful opportunity to have peaceful workdays we concentrated on the internal things and will continue working on them for the next few months. Do not expect too many new features cause keeping backend running smoothly under any load and pace of growth is the best feature of all.
We finished the month with the four-nines uptime — 99.9997%. A 100% mark was missed due to a 7-second downtime of the telematics gateway that occurred during its upgrade and basically went unnoticed.
- Internally we already changed a lot of things and the one you should obviously read about is the upcoming changes in REST API for streams subscriptions management and devices configuration. The good thing about the change is that now device configuration includes not only ident and phone number but also the protocol-specific fields. Say, for Teltonika devices you can configure SMS login and SMS password fields; phone numbers can only be entered if protocol knows how to format SMS message and even ident field scheme is now specified — so that user knows if it’s a 15-digit IMEI or an 8-digit serial number.
- Toolbox now colors device and channel messages based on the difference between message creation time reported by the device and the time our gateway received it. This is an important feature for everybody debugging devices data flow issues.
- Many flespi commercial users are now moving from pilot projects into real implementation and one of the most popular questions is how to use subaccounts and how to define good system architecture. To answer this question we published a special article with recommendations from flespi side.
- One of our largest users released the public Beta of their platform that relies purely on flespi as a backend. The platform is fresh and has some bugs but still, it is nice to play with and enjoy the high performance.
- We did special customization of MQTT channels to make them work with different data formats coming from various third party IoT platforms. On top of this, we also published an article describing flespi message parameters naming scheme for those who want to make customization of their data flows. A little later we will go further and let you define the data transformation scheme for all types of channels and streams.
- MQTT Tiles got a lot of new widgets like a map or a color picker plus the possibility to embed custom widgets with programmable behavior. On top of all that, you can import/export tiles configuration in a file. Also, the MQTT Tiles project has moved to open source — feel free to fork it on GitHub and adapt to your needs or create a new super-cool widget and make a pull request to include it to the mainstream.
And last but not least — flespi team is right now participating in the largest-ever TelematiX conference with more 600 people from all over the world discussing the dark side of the telematics business. We will keep you informed about the progress and the way we turned the world to an even darker side in our next monthly changelog.