24.06.20 Faster Bug Fixes and Global Loading Improvements

by Samuel Greer, Sr. Product Manager

Those of you astutely observing your Process360 Live version number since the release of v19.0 may have noticed that we’ve been incrementing the micro version number every few days. At the same time, you may have noticed that there hasn’t been a lot of additional downtime. There also haven’t been additional release highlights. Let’s take a minute to talk about what’s happening and what to expect going forward.

Content Delivery Network and Bug Fixes

We have some new architecture behind the scenes called a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This enables us to seamlessly release certain types of changes to the product called front-end only changes. Seamless in this case means no application downtime as we upgrade cloud customers from one version to the next and also means it’s less work for the development team to deploy the update. In practice, this is exciting because it means we can push out bug fixes as we find and fix them, rather than needing to wait till the next month for a release, or determining we need a hot fix which results in lost productivity.

There are many bugs that we cannot fix and release any faster with the help of the CDN, and for these issues, we appreciate your patience as we get things right.

Here’s an example of what the CDN can do for us:

During the v19 icon updates we implemented the same icon for Opportunities and Opportunity Instances:

This is both confusing to users, and something we can use the CDN to rapidly deploy a fix for with minimal effort. The Opportunity icon is intended to only be the lightbulb, with no circle around it. Any object icon that is an “instance”, such as an Opportunity Instance, is intended to have the circle.

Instead of needing to wait for version 19.1.0 that will come out later in June 2024, we can release this with version 19.0.8 which will come out very soon (or will probably already be out by the time you’re reading this article). We’re very excited to be able to start being consistently more responsive to your bug findings!

Content Delivery Network and Global Loading Improvements

The Content Delivery Network adjusts how our physical infrastructure is managed by adding a series of edge nodes around the globe. Think of these as small servers that are more geographically distributed, though only contain a small portion of the total application.

The idea here is that while the main server that stores all your operations content might be located far away from you, some content, like our icons (listed above), don’t change frequently and can be distributed around the globe to be closer to you. This content can then be loaded more quickly and reduce the amount of content that has to be served up from the main server cluster that is further away.

Ultimately, there are a lot of pieces that factor into a speedy experience and we’re working on tackling the many different angles involved. This is one of the many things we’re doing to shave down load times and improve your experience.

Going Forward

The CDN is here to stay and you can expect several things going forward:

Certain types of bug fixes are going to occur much faster
The micro version number is going to increment rapidly
Release Highlights will not be produced for these small releases that only include bug fixes or micro updates
Larger releases will continue to occur on our monthly cadence
Enhancing performance is a constant consideration, and something we continue to make improvements on

Action May Be Needed

In addition to the benefits of the CDN mentioned above, your IT team may need to take action if it has not whitelisted *.igrafxcloud.com. Whitelisting *.igrafxcloud.com is recommended, as more services may start being utilized under the parent domain in the future. If the IT team is unwilling to whitelist *.igrafxcloud.com, it may choose to only whitelist cdn.igrafxcloud.com.

If you or your team find that a number of page elements are not loading, or there are substantial display issues with the product, this may be a sign that your company’s firewall is blocking traffic from cdn.igrafxcloud.com. Please ensure that traffic from cdn.igrafxcloud.com is not blocked to ensure that the Content Delivery Network is able to serve the data needed to display Process360 Live correctly.

If you do not know if this applies to you, simply login to Process360 Live. If things seem normal, no action is needed.

Future Plans and the “Why”

Getting our CDN into place is only one step in a larger journey of our objectives to have frequent full-scale zero downtime releases. Introducing smaller changes more rapidly enables us to be more nimble to respond to your needs, and also improves our development and QA activities. Research also shows that implementing smaller changes more rapidly helps users adopt to what’s new more easily and we can get your feedback on what is or isn’t working more quickly so we know we’re solving the right stuff the right way to keep you productive.