Category: Kernl News

What’s New With Kernl – February 2019

February was a pretty busy month for Kernl! We had a lot of great tweaks to load testing, a few customer feature improvements, and some infrastructure work. Lets get started!

Features & Bugs

  • Multi-Region Load Tests – You can now select multiple regions for your WordPress load tests! Instead of having all traffic come from a single region you can have it evenly distributed across all the available regions. This is useful for testing if you have a global audience.
  • Load Testing Enters General Availability – Kernl’s WordPress load testing is now available for all customers.
  • Delete Load Tests – You are now able to delete your load tests.
  • License Max Version Bug – A customer brought to our attention that the “max_version” field behavior wasn’t quite right. This has been resolved.
  • Customer Card Expiration Cron Job Bug – We recently discovered that the cron job that checks to see if a customer has paid their invoice was broken. This was going on for about 5 months, so some of you may have received you Kernl subscription for free during that time period. 😉
  • Multiple License Domains – If you use our license management system and restrict via domains, you can now enter multiple domains on a per-license basis. This is useful if you want to use the same license for local, staging, and production.
  • License Management UI Updates – We’ve simplified the list view in license management by removing some columns that were cluttering the screen. We’ve also lined up the action buttons better and will now notify you in the plugin/theme detail pages if you have license management enabled but no licenses associated with your product.

Infrastructure

  • The Kernl Analytics server was re-sized to be smaller. It was way over allocated.
  • Load testing was moved to a Kernl sub-domain. Prior to this it had a top-level domain.
  • Load testing servers that don’t come up after 3 minutes are removed from the load testing pool.
  • Session handling (for OAuth) has been moved to cookies. Prior to this we stored sessions in Redis.
  • We have removed our dependency on the ‘Q’ promise package on the Node.js app servers.

Blog Posts

Thats it for this month!

Introducing WordPress Load Testing

In November 2018 Kernl launched the closed beta of our new WordPress load testing service. After a lot of changes based on the feedback we received we’re finally bringing WordPress Load Testing out of beta and into general availability.

Why Load Test?

There are a lot of different reasons to load test.

  • Infrastructure and Hosting – Kernl WordPress load testing gives you confidence that you are making the right decisions with your infrastructure and hosting. Looking to change hosts but aren’t sure how big or expensive of a plan you need? Run a load test.
  • Performance Testing – Load testing gives you confidence that the SQL query you just wrote isn’t going to collapse your website under load.
  • Confidence with your clients – Load testing lets you tell your clients with confidence that their new website can handle 100,000 visitors a day without any degradation in response time.
WordPress Load Testing graph
Load Test of Kernl Blog (horizontally scaled)

How Does It Work?

Kernl’s WordPress Load Testing solution makes load testing your WordPress site a breeze. You only need verify your ownership of the site with an easy to use WordPress plugin and then start testing. No coding or infrastructure management needed.

Start a load test in 1 minute

How Much Does it Cost?

Kernl’s WordPress Load Testing is included with your Kernl subscription. Usage per plan is as follows:

Plan TypeLoad TestsMax DurationMachine HoursRetention
Old Plans215 min55 days
Solo1060 min530 days
Agency30120 min3090 days
Enterprise &
Above		100300 min100365 days

If your needs don’t fit neatly into one of these categories feel free to reach out. We’d be happy to create a custom plan to suit your needs.

Sign Up Now

To get started with easy WordPress load testing, sign up for Kernl .

What’s New With Kernl – November 2018

It has been a busy few months for Kernl. Lots of great work has gone into the WordPress load testing feature work as well as a few structural changes to increase reliability.

  • Cache moved to Redis – For as long as Kernl has existed our cache backend was powered by Memcached. We have now finished migrating to Redis hosted at Compose.io.
  • AngularJS Upgrade to 1.7.5 – Fairly straight-forward upgrade to Angular 1.7.5. We wanted to take advantage of performance improvements and few bug fixes.
  • WordPress Load Testing – Over the past few months we’ve been cooking up something new. Imagine if you could easily test performance changes to you or your client’s WordPress installation? Or be able to tell your client with confidence how many customers at a time their site can support (and what their experience will be like!). What if you could do all this without writing a single line of code or spinning up your own testing infrastructure? We’re ready to start beta testing so send an email to jack@kernl.us if you would like to be a part of it.

Introducing The Kernl Analytics Agency Plan

Today we launched the next iteration of Kernl Analytics. The agency plan has been long in the making and we hope that you enjoy the new insights that you can extract with it.

Features

The Kernl Analytics agency plan is very similar to the “small” plan with two key differences:

  • Increased Data Retention – When the agency plan is selected, Kernl will hold on to your analytics data for 90 days (instead of the small plan’s single day). This also means that you can select a day in the past and see your analytics for it.
  • Compare Dates – With the agency plan you can select two dates and compare their data against each other. This is extremely useful if you would like to see adoption curves for WordPress versions, PHP versions, and installed versions of your plugin/theme. It allows you to make smart business decisions based on real data.

The Kernl Analytics agency plan is now available to all Kernl customers. The fee is $30/month on top of your existing Kernl plan. Reach out to jack@kernl.us if you have any questions!

August 14 2018 Outage Post-Mortem

Below is a post-mortem analysis of Kernl’s August 14 2018 outage. It details what happened, why it happened, and how we can improve things so that this doesn’t happen again in the future.

What?

At 9:29PM EDT alerts were triggered saying that Kernl was down. Initial investigation showed that the marketing site was still up and that some (but not all) update requests were still going through. Upon further investigation, it was found that Kernl’s connection to MongoDB had stopped working.

In most situations the DB connection dropping would have caused only a momentary blip while we failed over to our secondary, but in this case that wasn’t possible.

Why?

Further investigation revealed that our Mongo provider (Compose.io) was experiencing an outage in some of their Digital Ocean environments. Unfortunately this outage effected not only our primary Mongo host but also our backup secondary host. Due to the nature of the outage automatic failover for Mongo wasn’t a possibility.

Actions Taken

  • Determined the source of the downtime.
  • Contacted Compose.io support to resolve the issue.
  • After not hearing back from support for 30 minutes, work was started on an alternate plan for bringing Kernl back up.
  • After 45 minutes of no response from Compose.io support the alternate plan was enacted.
    • The alternate plan was to restore Kernl’s Mongo cluster into a different data center using the daily backup. The only downside was that that backup was 6 hours old, which means there is a possibility that customers will need to re-build or re-upload some plugin and theme versions.
  • Cache lifetime for all Kernl endpoints was doubled. This was done because the new data center was outside of Digital Ocean NYC3. The increased cache lifetime helps combat the increased latency.
  • Kernl’s downtime ended at roughly 11:00PM. The Compose.io incident wasn’t resolved until several hours after this so we feel that the decision to restore from a backup was the right one.

What’s Next?

Compose.io has been our Mongo provider for years now and we’ve never experienced any significant downtime. That being said, they don’t actually support DigitalOcean anymore and plan to kill their support for it at sometime in the future.

Our next steps are to evaluate how Kernl performs with the database in another data center. If things look good, we will likely move Kernl’s Mongo instances to the new data center permanently where they can be better supported by Compose. It is our suspicion that if we had been in one of their more popular data centers that we would have received help faster.

Once again, apologies for the downtime and we’ll continue to work hard so that it doesn’t happen again!

What’s New With Kernl – August 2018

Happy (almost) August everyone! This month with Kernl was focused on fixing some technical debt and adding a few features surrounding analytics.

Features & Bug Fixes

  • Analytics Top Level Menu – Kernl Analytics now has a top-level menu item. Prior to this change you had to enter a plugin/theme page before you could access it.
  • Analytics Product & Date Selector – Coupled with the analytics top-level menu, you can now select which product you want to see analytics for directly in the page. You can also select the date if you have the “agency” plan or above.
  • Session Store Moved to Memcached – For most of Kernl’s life sessions have been stored in Mongo. Recently we moved to storing sessions in Memcached.
  • GitLab Integration Bug Fix – The GitLab integration was broken for a few days after GitLab disabled their v3 API. This has been resolved.
  • The .kernlignore file had a few bugs related to processing it. These have been resolved.
  • Along with the session storage change we cleaned up a few collections in Mongo.
  • Node.js was upgraded to 8.11.3.

What’s New With Kernl – July 2018

I hope everyone in the northern hemisphere is enjoying their summer and for those of you in the southern hemisphere, stay warm! It was a nice month for Kernl with lots of good structural changes and a few new features rolled out.

  • SendOwl Integration – If you use SendOwl to distribute your plugin or theme you can now validate license keys with Kernl. This means that every time a customer checks to see if an update is available Kernl will first validate their SendOwl license.
  • Analytics Aggregate Data – Kernl Analytics now uses aggregate data to populate charts. This means that charts load instantly versus taking a few seconds as they did before. This was a big change and enables us to do neat things in the future like calculating changes over time.
  • Analytics Domains – In addition to using aggregate data to populate charts Kernl Analytics now has improved domain list support. Data is properly paginated, populated via aggregates for speed, and searchable.
  • Version Number Improvements – Kernl now supports version numbers such as 10.2.2-alpha or 9.2.1-beta. Previously the alpha|beta tags at the end were not supported.
  • Download Graph Bug Fix – A customer reported that the download chart in the plugin/theme detail pages weren’t quite right. This bug has been fixed.
  • License Management  – The license management page was occasionally showing duplicates. This bug has been fixed.

Thats it for this month!

 

 

What’s New With Kernl – June 2018

It’s been a great month for Kernl! Lots of new features, some bug fixes, and few updates to the license checking on the plugin and theme update checker files. Lets dive in!

Features

  • Gumroad License Validation – You can now use Kernl to validate your Gumroad licenses! This can be enabled for plugins or themes by going to the product edit screen, clicking the “License Management” tab, and then selecting “Validate Gumroad License?” at the bottom.
  • Kernl Referral Program – Kernl has a referral program. For every 3 referrals you send us we’ll give you a free month. Customers signing up with your referral code get their first 3 months free.
  • Restrict Updates to a Maximum Version – If you use Kernl’s license management you can now restrict update availability to a maximum version. For example if the current version of your product was 1.5.0 and you gave the user a license for < 1.6.0, then they would receive updates all the way through 1.5.X. This is a great way to drive more sales of your product!
  • Plugin/Theme PHP Update Check Files – The license error display behavior of these files has been greatly improved. The error dismisses when it’s supposed to, only shows up on the updates and plugin|theme page, and the license error message can now be customized. It is highly recommended that you update. The file is also versioned now so knowing when to update in the future will be much easier.

Other

  • Purchase Code Deprecation – Kernl’s old purchase code frontend interface has been hidden behind a feature flag. The goal is the have the old purchase code functionality completely removed by the end of July.
  • Copy Versions from Product to Product – To support special development styles, you can move versions of a product to another product. This is inherently dangerous and only toggled on for the person who requested it. If you think this might be useful please reach out to jack@kernl.us.
  • You can now easily click to a customer’s page from the License Management page.
  • A bug was fixed where the customer filter would stay set even after you had navigated away from that page.
  • Numerous copy changes were made on the License Management page and on the marketing site.
  • Some feature flags were removed from features that have proved to be stable.
  • The main route for plugin update checks (also the highest traffic route on Kernl) was refactored to use async/await instead of promise chains. This makes it much easier to maintain and improve.

Kernl Now Supports Gumroad License Validation

If you use Gumroad to sell your WordPress plugins or themes you can now use Kernl to validate those licenses before new updates are made available.

How does it work?

When you create a plugin/theme in Kernl you can select the “Validate Gumroad License?” checkbox and fill out the “Gumroad Product Permalink” field. With those two fields completed Kernl will validate the license code passed into the Kernl via the update checker against Gumroad’s public license API. If the license code passes validation Kernl will allow the update to proceed.

That’s all there is to it! If you need any help getting things set up reach out to jack@kernl.us.

License Management Update: Limit Updates to Specific Version

Kernl WordPress license management now allows you to limit updates up to a specific version.

How it Works

Assuming that you already use Kernl’s license management, go to the License Management area of Kernl. Once there add or edit a license.

Now you can fill in the “Max Update Version” field. This field can simply be described as “the version of your product which requires a customer to buy a new license”. For example:

  • Customer A bought a license with “Max Update Version” set to 2.0.0. The product was at version 1.7.0 at the time of purchase. Over the next few months you release 1.8.0, 1.9.0, 1.9.1, 2.0.0, 2.0.1. Customer A only receives product update versions 1.8.0, 1.9.0, and 1.9.1.

Why should I use this?

Drive. More. Sales. This new feature allows you to be extremely granular about what updates a specific customer receives. We also made updates to plugin_update_check.php and theme_update_check.php that allow you to customize the invalid/expired license message. We strongly believe that this combination of better license expiration messages and limiting through specific update version can be instrumental in helping you drive more sales.