Between November 25th and and December 29th platform updates are placed on hold in order to minimize any impact to customers who rely on the holiday season for a significant portion of their revenue. So November and the vast majority of December didn’t see any significant changes released. But we were still working hard behind-the-scenes to make great improvements, and now that the holiday season is behind us, we rolled them out.
In our final platform update of the year we primarily focused on a number of back-end performance optimizations as well as a few UI updates. Below is a list of what made it into our December 31st update.
- SSL Deployments: We released a significant update to the back-end processing of SSL Certificate and Key uploading, pairing and attaching to configs/packs. This new back-end processor improves the deployment speed ten-fold and will make a noticeable impact for customers who batch update certificates on a regular basis.
- SSL Table Ordering: We made a small change to how SSL certificates, keys and pairs are ordered by default in the tables shown in the panel. They now are ordered by the most recently uploaded or paired vs. other criteria. You can still click on a column to change the ordering to any other method you prefer.
- SSL Redeployment: Previously when a public-facing SSL port change was made, all SSL certificates attached to that port were redeployed (as a check and balance). This was not a significant issue for customers with only a few hundred SSL certs attached to a config/pack, but customers with thousands of SSL certificates would see a deployment delay as a result. We significantly improved this process to eliminate these deployment delays.
- SSL Status: We added status icon displays for SSL Certificates, Keys, Pairing and attaching inside of configs/packs in the UI. This new status specifically displays whether any of these items encountered and error when being deployed across our global network. If an error was encountered, it will provide more detail when hovering your mouse over the icon. This will aid you and Total Uptime support staff when troubleshooting. The process of pushing cert and key files across our global network quickly and reliably has been a challenge because of our security-first approach (there are many levels of encryption and decryption) and occasionally one of these processes fail. This new status is monitored 24×7 by our network operations center allowing us to proactively fix failed deployments and provide better logging to our development team for further improvement.
- DNS Failover: We increased the DNS Failover node-confirmation check value to allow setting 7 nodes to agree vs. the prior ceiling of 6. Customers can take advantage of this increased value to better prevent false or premature failovers especially if they are primarily concerned with the results from a specific geography (e.g. North America) and do not really want other geographies to determine a failover situation.
- UI Search: We resolved a regression whereby a search performed in a number of tables within the panel would not properly show that a search filter was in effect. Now when a search is performed, it is visually obvious again that a filter is in place and a button is shown to allow quick removal of the filters.
- Networking Change Speed: Over the course of the year we made a number of significant back-end improvements to the speed of networking change deployments when multiple customers are making complex changes concurrently. We pushed a few minor improvements to this process in this 20.12.0 release that further enhance how we manage this specific scenario to improve overall deployment time.
- DNS TXT Records: We continue to see invalid data entered in DNS TXT records and have updated validation logic to better inspect the entered data to ensure it is compliant. DNS TXT is a tricky record type since it is designed to accept free form text, but there are a few gotchas that customers would occasionally encounter that have now been addressed.
- DNS Reporting: On December 16th we released a non-critical (but important!) update to the DNS Reporting back-end analytics processing system. Prior to this date DNS query data was not properly being captured from all of our global DNS servers for processing by our analytics system. We corrected these issues and the statistics you now see in the panel are accurate where the data on or before December 16th inaccurately reflected only a portion of the DNS traffic seen. This was primarily due to the fact that our DDoS attack filters were incorrectly stripping off DNS query data for DNS traffic that was not the result of a DDoS attack.
That concludes our updates for 2020. Happy New Year, everyone!
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