April was huge month for Kernl with regards to infrastructure! We also fixed a handful of bugs and started work on a new analytics feature. Let’s dig in.
Features, bugs, & infrastructure
- RoboSwarm, the Kernl product that powers our load testing product, has been migrated to Heroku. This is part of a broader effort to spend more money so that managing servers doesn’t take precious hours away from business and product development.
- RoboSwarm client application has been migrated to Vercel. It now lives on a global CDN for much faster access.
- Kernl Analytics Raw Data Performance – While Kernl doesn’t operate at Google scale, we do operate at a scale where performance can’t be ignored. The Kernl Analytics raw data ingestion performance has been improved by ~15% by using targeted caching for common look ups.
- Bug – The Kernl update endpoint would occasionally return a malformed object. This was the artifact of a refactor that didn’t have good test coverage. Test coverage has been updated and the bug has been fixed.
- Kernl Analytics has been migrated to DigitalOcean App Platform. This plus the PostgreSQL database being migrated means it is roughly 2x the cost to operate, but now requires zero server maintenance.
- Bug – Kernl WordPress Load Testing wasn’t honoring the user request per second figure. This lead to 50 user load tests generating more than 700 req/s. This has been resolved.
- Bug – After migrating Kernl’s client-side application to Vercel there were some images that didn’t load correctly. This has been resolved.
- Analytics – We’re now tracking update request volume on a per plugin/theme basis. This will eventually be exposed in your plugin/theme detail page to give you a better idea of how large your audience in.
That’s it for this month! See you in May.