Network, product and website updates

By Bjarni Rúnar 2018-04-18, 13:41

Things have been relatively quite here on the PageKite blog for the last few months.

However, operations are ongoing!

There was some excitement back in January, when most of our hosting providers deployed emergency Meltdown and Spectre patches at the start of the year, which reduced performance enough (by about 20%) that we had to bring quite a few more relays on-line to compensate.

We are now operating 40 over servers in various places around the globe!

This may seem like a lot, but it's actually a very good thing for the stability of our service. The more servers we have to spread the load, the less impact it has when one goes down. One of the things that makes PageKite unique is how well pagekite.py and libpagekite adapt to network problems and reroute traffic as necessary. The more servers they have to work with, the better!

However, with so many servers live, administration does become tricky. PageKite is a small team (usually just me), and we depend a great deal on automation to make this possible. In order to simplify our operations we have started using Ansible internally for server management, and are actually well on our way to making that into an on-site product we can offer to our larger customers. This product probably won't launch until late this year or sometime in 2019, as we want to be sure we've ironed out all the kinks. These things take time! We are currently running a pilot program with one of our embedded OEMs and things are going well.

We are also in the process of reviewing the contents of this web-site, and will be making some minor (and some major) updates over the next few weeks and months to better communicate and explain how PageKite works. In particular, there are also some absolute gems in our community wiki that deserve more attention. For example, did you know that OpenVPN connections can be tunneled over PageKite? I didn't, that was news to me!

Making these changes will be an iterative process, rather than a big all-at-once redesign. There may be some downtime as we migrate the site to a new server though. We'll try to announce that step in advance.

That's it for now! Take care and thanks for using PageKite.