What’s New With Kernl – October 2020

Happy (almost) November! It was a very bug-fix and infrastructure heavy month for Kernl, so lets dive in!

Features, Bugs, & Infrastructure

  • Redis robust connection handling – We’ve done some resiliency work so that Redis failing will not cause any issues in Kernl. If Redis goes away, all traffic is handled un-cached. Once it comes back, we automatically re-connect. We will also timeout any calls to Redis after 50ms and assume it failed.
  • Stripe Checkout – Kernl has been using a deprecated version of Stripe’s Checkout.js for the past year or so. We finally migrated to using Stripe’s Checkout service which directs you to Stripe’s website for card adding, and then back to Kernl. Localization and card handling is a lot better this way, and you should have fewer issues adding different payment types to Kernl.
  • Composer Installation – You can now install the Kernl update checker via Composer. Go to your plugin or theme detail page and look for the new tab in the “Meta” section.
  • Node.js – All Kernl servers have been upgraded to 12.19.0. This new version of Node.js brings stability and security improvements with it.
  • RoboSwarm Email Bug – There was a regression where RoboSwarm was sending an email when Kernl customers signed up. RoboSwarm powers the Kernl WordPress load testing service.
  • Build pipeline – We use BitBucket’s Pipelines services to power the continuous integration of our code base. There was a test with intermittent failures that was causing this to fail in unusual ways.
  • Admin account bug – A bug was fixed where an admin could get their account into a bad state by adding themselves as a team member.
  • License management documentation update – We’ve corrected an omission in the license management API docs. The notes field was missing from the documentation.
  • Invoices – For the longest time Kernl generated it’s invoices via WKHTMLtoPDF. We’ve finally switched over to using the invoices that Stripe generates for us, removing a significant headache from our code base.
  • Server host name – In load balanced systems it can be hard to track down issues if you don’t know what origin server it came from. Kernl now returns the origin server host name in the response headers to make this easier.
  • Development environment upgrades – All of our build packages have been upgraded to latest versions.
  • We wrote a blog post: “EasyWP WordPress Performance Review 2020“

That’s it for this month!