What’s New With Kernl – March 2021

It was an eventful March at Kernl, so without further ado let’s dive in!

Features, Infrastructure, & Bug Fixes

  • All application servers have been upgraded to use AMD Premium droplets on DigitalOcean. These have better performance characteristics than the regular droplets and should make Kernl’s performance more consistent.
  • The licensing /validate-with-domain endpoint now includes the expires field and the product UUID.
  • The high-traffic update routes (the ones that WordPress calls to see if any new updates are available for plugins/themes) received some performance tweaks. We saw ~20ms performance gains.
  • Kernl now supports banners!
  • Analytics event tracking now uses a Redis queue to shuffle events from Kernl to Kernl Analytics. Prior to this, Kernl would make a backend API request to Kernl Analytics on every request. This caused performance degradation in cases where traffic was burst-y.
  • Documentation has been added for load testing if your WordPress site is behind Cloudflare.
  • Kernl, Kernl Analytics, Kernl Load Testing, and RoboSwarm are now all using a managed Redis instanced provided by DigitalOcean.
  • Kernl Load Testing and RoboSwarm are now using a managed PostgreSQL instance provided by DigitalOcean.
  • All static files for Kernl are now hosted on Vercel (global CDN).

That’s it for March! Have a great April.