Today is July 1 which means that we’ve passed the first half of 2021. Together with the quarter change yesterday’s evening we reached the mark of 300,000 registered devices on the platform which we are going to celebrate with homemade bakery soon (will add pictures to the next changelog).
Is 300K devices a lot or not in the modern IoT world? Compared to our big brother Wialon with 1.5M of devices connected this is not that much. Especially given the fact that half of our devices belong to a single GPS-Trace project. But another half belongs to our commercial users which grew by 50% since the beginning of the year. I personally consider this as a good dynamic. A lot of projects on top of flespi are in progress at the moment — from small startups to large corporations. It means that each month we will continue growing with more and more devices and consumer systems connected all over the world. And we are ready for this. Computing power in our data centers is growing gradually each month and human resources keep optimizing processes to deliver additional tools to improve the efficiency of each flespi team member and each of our customers.
Together with that I strongly believe that the best middleware is the one that mitigates all possible troubles and operates as smoothly as possible. If you look at our recent uptime history you will mostly notice 100% or values very close to that. At the same time if you scroll the history to 2018 or 2019 you will notice that monthly uptime bars there were less stable. There are two reasons for the current stability trend:
We improved the quality of our operations and are installing updates more carefully because we know that a lot of users worldwide are dependent on us.
Our uplink provider of the EU region data center greatly improved its network quality.
To make it even harder for us to maintain 100% monthly uptime we added to our automatic monitoring system more locations all over the world from which we are probing flespi platform operations each minute. Right now there are 12 locations worldwide and if 60% of them report troubles, we will automatically declare global downtime. The major part of these diagnostic locations is located in various AWS regions to make it even more convenient for our users. The list of AWS regions that is under the constant monitoring from our side is: Europe (eu-central-1, eu-west-2, eu-north-1), North America (us-west-1, us-east-2), Asia & Pacific (ap-south-1, ap-southeast-1), South America (sa-east-1), Africa (af-south-1). In July we plan to create a special health page that will show the current flespi region operation status and latency for all these locations.
In June we integrated five new protocols into flespi and more are scheduled for July. Among those already integrated are: streamax, eview, megastek, sinotrack, and fitrider.
One blog article that I recommend you to look into is a simple but practical introduction to flespi analytics. This is the reading where both new and experienced analytics users can find something interesting for them.
In June we did a lot of internal optimizations and even more will be implemented and installed in July. Nothing to mention here, because for you it means better response time, more throughput, and more reliability for the API calls — but this is what you should not care about. Let it be our pain and for you flespi will remain a very simple system, easy to understand, with logical behavior and high availability.