New year, new infrastructure

Brand-new Macs about to join their many siblings in the data centre. Think integration day, for computers.

Some people ring in the new year with party streamers and silly string. For 2016, I chose nylon ties and CAT6 cables, as the holidays marked the beginning of the largest technology upgrade cycle in the history of Fluxiom. As clients’ businesses grow in numerous and exciting ways, so does mine. With ever more files on Fluxiom, ever more images on Maiko, and ever more client sites to run, I felt the time had come to step up the game in a big way.

All-new platform

My commitment to privacy and security runs deep. The brand-new platform continues to be designed, operated, and maintained in-house using the latest Apple hardware for optimal reliability and efficiency. I never outsource client data to opaque clouds, and take full responsibility for its safekeeping.

Each layer of the stack now runs on multiple dedicated machines, without wasting a drop of power on virtualisation. Hot spares and bespoke deployment recipes empower me to face the unpredictable, from hardware failures to overnight sensations, by bringing up additional equipment at any time, in a matter of minutes.

These new, turbo-charged servers run the latest major Ruby and Rails versions. Over the next six months, I’ll progressively upgrade every app to the very latest iteration of these fast-moving technologies, enabling me to squeeze every drop of power and reliability from the new hardware.

The new platform is already up and running and undergoing the final tests. I’ll be moving client services transparently to the new setup over the coming few weeks, as the old platform progressively winds down.

End of support for older browsers

On 12 January 2016, Microsoft stopped supporting older versions of Internet Explorer. While I’m not yet ready to take such drastic steps, I’ll stop supporting IE 7–9 on 1 March 2016.

Older versions of Explorer are not only fundamentally insecure, they also lack support for the modern web technologies needed to introduce new features and interfaces. Supporting these older and marginal browsers means withholding improvements from everybody, which I feel is not an acceptable trade-off.

While I won’t lock out anybody by design, I’ll stop testing new releases against these browsers. For their own security and peace of mind, I encourage all customers to upgrade to supported versions of Explorer or cross-grade to browsers like Chrome and Firefox today.

Summary

• Fluxiom is upgrading all its software and hardware
• The upgrade will be fully transparent to end-users
• Exciting new features will launch in the second half of 2016
• Support for Internet Explorer 7–9 will end on 1 March