Category: Kernl News

Introducing Team Management and the Kernl Unlimited Plan

One of the most requested features that Kernl gets is Team Management. Team management can take on a lot of different forms, but for Kernl’s purposes it is the ability to share access via the Kernl interface with multiple people with different sets of credentials.

Team Management

Starting today you can sign up for the Kernl Unlimited plan (see below) and start managing your team. Team management allows you to share your Kernl account with authorized users. When a user is part of your team, they have a slightly restricted view of Kernl but otherwise see the same things you do. What’s restricted?

  • Continuous Deployment – Adding connected Git repositories is the responsibility of the admin. Non-admin users don’t need to see this information.
  • Billing – Once again, this is an admin responsibility. The admin is able to change plans, add credit cards, etc.
  • Team Management – Only the admin can add and remove users from their account.

Aside from that everything is the same for admin and non-admin users.

Kernl Team Management

The Unlimited Plan & Pricing Changes

In addition to team management we are also reducing the number of plans that Kernl has. Prior to this change we had 5 different plans (solo, agency, enterprise, huge, massive) which seemed like a bit much. To simplify Kernl’s pricing structure and give our customers better options we went down to 3 plans:

  • Solo – This $9 per month plan is our base plan. Most customers start here and then grow into larger plans as their needs change.
  • Agency – The $39 agency plan is essentially our former “Enterprise” plan but with increased limits for plugins, themes, licenses, load testing, and feature flags.
  • Unlimited – This new $79 unlimited plan allows you to have unlimited plugins, themes, licenses, feature flags and very high limited on load testing (50K concurrent users). This plan also includes team management so you can more easily control access to your Kernl account.

As always, current Kernl customers are grandfathered into the plan that they are currently on.

Kernl Pricing

What’s Next?

Now that Kernl has a more robust upper-level offering we hope to start rolling more features into it. For example:

  • In the near future we’ll include Kernl Analytics with Unlimited plan.
  • We’re also planning on rolling out limited team management into the Agency plan.

What’s New With Kernl – October 2019

October held a lot of great work for Kernl! Lots of refactoring, test coverage increases, and a new UI for managing Git deployments. Let’s dive in!

Features

  • Git Continuous Deployment UI Changes – Kernl now has a new and improved interface for adding continuous deployment to your projects.
  • Installed Plugin List Filter – You can now easily filter the installed plugin data in Kernl Analytics. Prior to this change the best you could do is column sort.

Infrastructure, Bugs, & Other

  • Fetching BitBucket repos with more that 20 branches failed. This has been resolved.
  • The plugin/theme webhook build log didn’t handle the case where a user had just signed up and didn’t have any build requests yet.
  • Easy Digital Downloads license validation was failing on newer versions of EDD. Kernl has been updated to support the newer version API as well as the older API.
  • The Git integration has been refactored and had additional test coverage added.
  • Kernl was upgraded to Node 12.13.x. With this upgrade we get async stack traces and a non-trivial decrease in response time (~50ms).

Blog Posts

What’s New With Kernl – September 2019

I hope that everyone has had a great September! There has been some interesting changes with Kernl this month, so let’s dive in and discuss them.

Features

  • Credit Card Add Changes – For the past 3 years Kernl has had a simple credit card form (card number, expiration, etc). In an effort to help reduce fraud we’ve migrated out card addition system to use Stripe’s Checkout.js. This gives us advanced fraud protection provided by Stripe and the added benefit that your card details never hit Kernl’s servers.
  • Continuous Deployment Setup – Kernl is in the middle of a big UI change for continuous deployment setup. The first step was making the ‘connect your Gitlab/GitHub/BitBucket account’ piece a lot prettier. We’ve now made it a 3 panel selection, with nice big logos and fewer ways to get confused. Check it out by going to the “Continuous Deployment” section in Kernl.
  • Repository Pruning – Kernl will now prune repositories from your repository list that you no longer have access to or no longer have connected with Kernl. The exception here is that we’ll keep a reference to repositories that you have connected to plugins or themes.
  • Invoice Payment Failure Notifications – We recently had an issue where a customer wasn’t notified that their payment failed (card had expired) 🙁 This should be resolved now as we’ve integrated with Stripe web hooks and immediately catch the event and send a message to the account owner. We’ve also added a notification preference so that you can silence these emails.

Other

  • All packages have been upgraded on all Kernl servers.
  • Marketing pages are now cached in Redis.
  • Fixed a customer reported bug in plugin_update_check.php that threw a warning in newer versions of PHP. Upgrade to version 1.2.2 to get the fix.
  • Feature flag setup wizard had weird behavior if the customer didn’t have any plugins or themes. You can now manually name your feature flag product in the wizard if you so choose.
  • Fixed a few bugs in the feature flag UI where adding/removing individual users from a flag would occasionally fail.
  • The buttons to manually manage deploy keys have been moved to the bottom of the continuous deployment page. They also come with a disclaimer now.

Blog Posts

Beta testing WordPress plugin features with Kernl WordPress Feature Flags

What’s New With Kernl – July & August 2019

I hope everyone has had a great summer (or winter if you are in the southern hemisphere)! Over the past 2 months we’ve gotten a lot great stuff done, so let’s dive in.

Features & Infrastructure

  • Kernl has upgraded from Mongo 3.x to Mongo 4.2 with WiredTiger. We get improved performance and the latest features with this change.
  • Our Redis instance has moved to DigitalOcean along with the rest of our infrastructure. Prior to this we were using managed host that lived outside the NYC3 data center. Response times decreased ~50ms or so with this change.
  • The high traffic plugin and theme update check endpoints had a round of performance tuning done. Resource consumption was lowered in meaningful way.
  • 🔥🔥🔥Kernl Analytics Active Plugins🔥🔥🔥- Kernl Analytics will now track what plugins are most active across your install-base. You only need to be signed up for Kernl Analytics and use the latest plugin_update_check.php file to get this new feature.
  • Our MongoDB database has been moved to DigitalOcean NYC3. Prior to this we were hosting on Compose.io outside of the datacenter. Originally this decision was made because managing databases is tough, but the quality of hosting at Compose has gone done significantly in the past year. With this change we shaved ~150ms off of response times.
  • Some tweaks were made to our network firewalls to make them easier to manage. Thanks DigitalOcean!
🔥🔥🔥Kernl Analytics Active Plugins 🔥🔥🔥

Bug Fixes

  • Load testing machines would fail to provision if the API call to DigitalOcean failed. This has been resolved.
  • The load testing master node would fail to start sometimes if secondary nodes failed to connect. The threshold for starting tests has been lowered so that this won’t happen anymore.
  • If a credit card expires and the invoice payment fails, the account isn’t marked as paid when a new card is added and a successful payment happens.
  • When switching between themes/plugins in Kernl Analytics the domain data wasn’t reloading with the new plugin/theme.
  • Thanks to a customer bug report and code snippet, the plugin_update_check.php no longer sends headers before the license check fails.

Blog Posts

That’s it for July and August!

What’s New With Kernl – June 2019

Hello everyone! Kernl got some pretty interesting updates this month, so let’s dive in!

Features

Average & Median Response Times for Load Tests – Kernl’s WordPress load testing services has always had this data available, we just never surfaced it in a way that was easy to consume. You’ll now see a new tab when you run a load test with information about average and median response times during the course of your test.

Progress Bar for Load Test Initialization – When you create a load test you will now see a progress bar that indicates how far in the process of instantiating your infrastructure we are. Prior to this update it was easy to think that the process had stalled out or broke.

Bug Fixes & Other

  • Load test site ownership verification would fail to certain types of HTML minification. This has been resolve.
  • Our internal analytics services has been refactors to be a singleton. This reduced each app server’s memory footprint by 5MB.
  • The public license validate endpoint now has a 10 second cache on it. This helps us deal with any sort of burst traffic from license validations.
  • Home page Javascript has been minified and concatenated into a single script to decrease load time.
  • All packages have been update on our servers.

Thats it for June! If you have any questions reach out to jack@kernl.us.

What’s New With Kernl – May 2019

There was a lots of work on Kernl’s WordPress Load Testing this month, so lets dive in and learn about it!

Features & Bug Fixes

  • Reliability Load Testing – Have you ever wondered how a WordPress host performs over an extended period of time? Kernl’s new reliability testing allows you to answer that question. You can now run low volume (25 user) load tests for up to 30 hours.
  • Load Test Sharing Page Improvements – You can now see a graph of the total number of failures when you share your load test results. See an example at https://kernl.us/wordpress-load-testing/results/553f746e7a1fa8663be442a9/333.
  • Download Full Load Test Data – You are now able to download all the data from your load test. This is the full, non-sampled, data set that Kernl produces during a load testing run.
  • Sampled Load Test Data – Kernl’s WordPress load testing service can create a lot of data, so for data sets over a certain size we now sample the data. This helps all of charts load faster and improve your experience.

That’s it for this month!

What’s New With Kernl – April 2019

Lots of great stuff came down the pipeline this month at Kernl, so lets dive in!

Features / Bugs / Improvements

  • Share Load Tests – You can now share your load tests publicly! Just click the “share” button that shows up after your load test is completed.
  • Analytics Widget – If you scroll down past the list of plugin/theme versions in the product detail view you’ll now see a widget with analytics data (for Kernl Analytics subscribers).
  • Load Testing Line Graph Performance – For large load testing data sets the line graph performance has been improved by disabling some of the flashier features of Chart.js
  • Analytics page now attempts to show the analytics for the first product in your product list upon entry.
  • NODE_ENV was not set to “production” on our app servers. It is now.
  • The transition to a fully managed load balancer is now complete.

Blog Posts

Thats it for this month!

Introducing Shareable WordPress Load Test Results

For quite awhile now Kernl has had the ability to throw some serious load at your WordPress site, but never a great way to share the results. Today that changes with the introduction of load test result sharing!

🎉

Why would I share my load test results?

The main use case for sharing your load test results is showing your clients that their new WordPress site can handle the traffic load that they expect. For someone like a YouTube or Twitter celebrity this can be a very real problem. Larger organizations also would enjoy this peace of mind.

How do I get started?

Easy! Just click the share button next to the load test that you want to share. You’ll be presented with your sharing URL that can be copy and pasted into Facebook, Twitter, Slack, or Email!

Can I see some examples?

Yes!

As always, feel free to reach out to Jack if you have any questions!

What’s New With Kernl – March 2019

March was a great month for Kernl! We did some blogging, a bunch of infrastructure work, and a little bit of unplanned work due to API deprecation at BitBucket.

Features & Updates

  • Resource Starvation (Load Testing) – We’ve decreased the number of users per machine that Kernl WordPress Load Testing uses. This helps prevent resource starvation on the load generation servers.
  • Pre-Configured Load Tests – Kernl now has 4 different pre-configured load tests to make testing your site’s performance even easier!
  • BitBucket API Update – BitBucket API calls now use Oauth2 and their v2 endpoints. The v1 endpoints are going away in April.
  • Analytics – All of the features available in Kernl Analytics Agency plan have been rolled into one single plan at the same $10/month price point as the small plan. We also increased data retention to 365 days to make our comparison tool more useful.
  • Load Test Working Indicator – Load tests will now show a “working” indicator when in a state before the load test has started but after you have submitted your request to start a load test.
  • MongoDb Driver – The MongoDB driver that we use has been upgraded for better connection retry handling.
  • Updates – Kernl Analytics and Kernl WordPress Load Testing have been upgraded to Node.js 10.15.3 and have had all of their packages updated.
  • License Management Widget – The license management widget was throwing an error when no error was present. This has been resolved.

Blog Posts

Changes to Kernl Analytics

When Kernl analytics was first released we had tiered approach to pricing:

  • A ‘small’ plan with simple daily analytics and 24 hours of data retention.
  • A ‘agency’ plan with data comparison and 90 day data retention.

After looking through our usage data and analytics, we’ve decided that there will now only be a single analytics plan (at the same $10/month price point). It will have the following features:

  • Data comparison between dates. This allows you to see trends with your plugin or theme usage.
  • Data retention of 1 year. Long data retention gives you the ability to see trends that might not be obvious with shorter retention periods.

Thats it! If you have questions reach out to jack@kernl.us