This May happened to be a very intensive month for flespi. We invented and released a whole new module that is now considered a very logical and important component of the platform, participated in the Gurtam Big Week conference with 5 speeches made by our team, integrated 3 new protocols and numerous new devices into the telematics gateway, participated in 2 webinars, enriched our team with a new talent and released a set of new features to make your life easier. And all this happened in a single month — impressive, isn’t it?
But let’s start as usual — our monthly uptime in May was 99.995% with 2 minutes of telematics database unavailability due to the high-intensity maintenance operations we did to load-balance data mirrors. Once we caught the telematics data accessibility problems during the maintenance procedure, we rolled out the upgrade to prevent such problems in the future and continued the maintenance. So this case should not reoccur in the future, however I believe there may be some new yet unknown issues that we will quickly solve, as usual. We grow each day, gather more and more experience and all the time make our system more protected, quicker and capable. With 280+ customers ranging from startups up to multinational companies, we are making flespi better and better for all of them.
However, getting back to May results, first I would like to introduce our new teammate — Andrei Ambrazevich — VP of Marketing, who joined our team a month ago. Andrei will be responsible for leading our Marketing activities.
- The new module we invented and released is called Grants. It is not yet documented, however is partially available in flespi.io in an experimental mode and is added to the pricing page. We decided to make grants available to our users for free as they are not the primary element for telematics, however in some cases they can save you a lot of problems.
Grants are used to provide access for some elements (devices, streams, channels, calculators, plugins, etc.) from one flespi subaccount to another within one root account hierarchy. We created grants in order to construct the convenient architecture of a multi-application solution based on flespi where different applications should have access to the same devices but operate in the dedicated subaccounts to preserve their own limits and set up their own calculators and plugins. However, grants are not only for this. Our users can use grants just to efficiently and securely organize the work of their support engineers, provide access to devices, calculators, streams, channels, plugins down the subaccount tree and so on. More information about how to use grants will follow soon. - A couple of months ago we released webhooks and now gathered 5 good use cases how they can simplify and automate your life — from automatic device creation and configuration to generating notifications to the Telegram Messenger in case you have some problem with your channel, stream, device and so on. Automate your daily routines with webhooks and save your time for more important tasks!
- We released a new AMQP 0-9-1 stream to RabbitMQ. AMQP is an ancient ancestor of MQTT, but due to the open source nature and reliability of RabbitMQ is still quite popular in the enterprise world.
- For those who are streaming telematics directly into AWS (and we have more than 80 of such users in flespi) we developed an alternative data flow to SQS queue. Although some parts of code in this article were created with the assistance of ChatGPT, still this option can save you money and increase throughput of your AWS receiver.
- For those who want to rely on LBS and Wi-Fi positioning when GNSS data is not available, we enhanced LBS and Google Wi-Fi geolocation plugins with the possibility to replace original coordinates with resolved from external service. This eliminates the need for an extra plugin to replace standard coordinates.
- We integrated 3 new protocols into flespi: itrybrand, huabao, and newtec and issued a lot of updates to other protocols which you can find in protocol-specific changelogs.
- And of course I suggest you either to watch (and the video in that case deserves your time) or to read the script of Jan Bartnitsky’s overview of flespi. This webinar should be particularly useful for those who already have some familiarity and experience with flespi but wants more efficiency and advanced use.
And as it was published in our roadmap now our team will be fully focused on the integration of video telematics features in flespi. We already selected a range of manufacturers we will initially cooperate with to integrate video functions, defined the development track, and engineered the initial API. Now it is time to implement everything related to video and given the fact that vacation season has just started this will be a very ambitious task to finish by the end of the summer. Stay tuned!
