Weekly Update from Alex - 07/10/16

This week I’d like to talk about one of the major upgrades we will be pushing over the next week. Generally I want to keep my message in the here and now but this is a major upgrade and deserves some pre-announcement.

Early next week we will be upgrading our backend to Grails v2.5.4. This upgrade has been a major undertaking by our engineering teams and we have been prepping for this upgrade for about a month now. Once the update is in production we will be able to move forward on a few other significant upgrades that we think will allow us to make further improvements to the performance and reliability of the entire platform.

To start, once we upgrade to Grails v2.5.4 we will be able to start work on upgrading our backend Java to Java 8. Java 8 is a big update and provides us with a lot of extra features that we don’t currently get. For example, we will be able to tune and tool our backend performance more granularly. Also, Java 8 is just a more stable Java product and has more support from the Java community.

We are sure there will be other notable changes so we are letting this update soak in our staging environment right now and verifying what these changes will mean for you. @slagle will be releasing a wider look into the changes and will be a resource to you as you develop on Grails 2.5.4. Expect a update from Tim early next week detailing all the changes.

These next few weeks and months will be centered around making these upgrades and I will make sure everyone is kept in the loop as we make progress.

-Alex

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Good luck!

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Just to clarify, does this Grails rollout start next week as in the 18th?

Also being new to the platform, are these rollouts staged or do they get released to production all at once?

This sounds as scary as an open heart operation.

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That’s because… this is the ST equivalent of open heart operation. I am excited and nervous at the same time.

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Ummmmmmmmm… Crap… Just crap…

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Right now we don’t have a mechanism to do staged rollouts in cases like this. It’ll hit everyone at the same time.[quote=“AlmostTan, post:4, topic:52469”]
Just to clarify, does this Grails rollout start next week as in the 18th?
[/quote]

Sorry, that is a little confusing now that I read over it again, it will start this week. But I will have a follow-up out before it rolls.

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Thanks for the answers!

Now I understand everyone’s fear! Will Java 8 yield this capability? Lots of big software players like Google seem to think it’s an important one for platform stability.

Thanks for clarifying, I thought that’s what he meant. Hope I don’t sound too pessimistic in the above; I am genuinely excited about the push towards stability despite having encountered few stability problems here and there.

Cheers to the engineers!

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Lots of people do it differently in the software game. In fact Apple mostly does a big push for everyone. Their software updates are available at 12pm to everyone the day the release it.

Google does staged rollouts 1%…10%…100% (or something like that)

Is one better than that other? Not sure, opinion is hard to prove. But, we have been soaking this for a while and think we understand the affects it will have and have it to a level of stability that it is ready to release.

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Sorry, I just edited that - I was thinking of two polar opposite companies in my head and didn’t mean to type both out. You’re absolutely right about Apple.

Well, fingers crossed this week! Thanks again!

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The difference being that Apple makes the update available to everyone at the same time, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to update immediately, so the early adopters become the beta group. They’ve also been known to do phased rollouts for products/updates.

Good luck! I hope all goes smoothly.

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@slagle Have you figured out what the number 1 change would be, as far as developers are involved?

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If this is rolling out as suddenly as seems to be indicated here, these coming weeks will be a make or break.

Smooth sailing… good times.

More things like DB corruption that cause me to have to rebuild all my app configs to keep things running… eh… don’t need this hassle in my life.

Good Luck to all, rooting for ST.

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Hopefully it’s not one that bring CoRE back to beta stage 0 without warning. That would be painful.

The cool thing about ST @ my place, is that I can easily ignore it, disable just a few key things, or unplug it and my life is back to normal no matter how whacky it gets. :expressionless:

I ignored it for 3 + months. I have wall switches and other systems that provide the primary functions (security, etc), so it’s not critical here.

Oh, it’s very critical here! We forgot how to use the light switches…So it will be a catastrophe if ST goes berzerk…

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This is from @vlad posted on a different thread . I am sure @slagle will have more in his upcoming communication.

"I don’t think the SmartApp developers will need to care about the Grails version as much as the version of Groovy that is upgraded as part of the Grails upgrade. We’ll be going from Grails 2.3.1 -> Grails 2.5.4, which is also an upgrade of Groovy (2.1.8 -> 2.4.4). Groovy follows a Semantic Versioning standard - which means that this upgrade should be backwards compatible to the previous version of Groovy - (the usual exceptions are bug fixes that previously required workarounds).

On our end its a pretty significant upgrade which is why this specific code change has been sitting in lower environments for weeks now as we flesh out bugs."

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While you are awake and watching your heart skip beats

Like performing CPR on yourself… Self sufficient stuff :slight_smile:

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