FiFo in 2017

It’s now 2017! and to celebrate the new year we wanted to give you a little glimpse of whats in store for this coming year.

FiFo 0.9.0

We aim to release the 0.9.0 version of FiFo towards the second half of January. With 0.9.0 we add a number of small changes and improvements. Most notably a considerable rework of the Multi Datacenter and a lot of small improvement to make use of the newer features in DalmatinerDB. We also have a few nice cleanups and improvements for the Cerberus UI.

DalmatinerDB 0.3.0

Along with the 0.9.0 release of FiFo we aim to publish DalmatinerDB 0.3.0. this includes better indexing and a vast number of new functions. Along with it we also add experimental support for events. Furthermore we added more protocols to the Dalmatiner Proxy now including InfluxDB, Prometheus (including the Prometheus persistent data storage protocol), OpenTSDB, Grafite and Metrics 2.0.

The road to the 1.0.0 release

This is the big news! A 1.0.0 release is probably the most important version of any software. If released too early you end up breaking backward compatibility quickly. You risk a version explosion and loose credibility. If released too late you’re stuck in pre-1.0.0 land forever which does not inspire much confidence either.

Project-FiFo has been in pre-1.0.0 for almost three years. That sounds like a long long time, but we are confident that it was the right decision. We are extremely careful and object to introducing breaking changes. While we tried to minimise breaking changes, we unfortunately did had a few of them. After the 1.0.0 release we are committed not to introduce any breaking changes in the foreseeable future. Last but not least we’ve learned a lot, as building a large system as big as FiFo is hard to get right.

As time progressed, our experience building, running, supporting FiFo in large and small installations has now reached the point of confidence that its an appropriate time for a big 1.0.0 release. The design is stable, the concept sound. We will therefore be working towards a 1.0.0 release around the third quarter of 2017. That also means that in the interim, we’ll focus on stability and code cleanup on the way to the 1.0.0 release in order to make your experience as nice as possible.

We hope you are as excited about 1.0.0 as we are!

ZTC & 1.0.0

Of course ZTC will also get some additional love and ironing out. A more streamlined UI is in the works, and while we don’t want to spoil everything just yet we’re really happy to introduce a proper audit log. This means for a managed FiFo ZTC instance, all actions are audited and will allow us to pinpoint who did what & when. Just like the rest of FiFo, this new audit log will be properly distributed.

The future!

The improvements don’t stop after the 1.0.0 release. However, we’ll do our best to keep anything after that compatible with the 1.0.0 API. With a stable starting point we’ll explore more features, and plan expand the hypervisors. Most notably we’ll take a look at expanding support for OmniOS and adding FreeBSD as potential targets for hypervisors.