Today, we finally released an update to Jidoteki Meta - v1.9.0, which contains a handful of security updates, and only one new major feature: backups.
The security updates are the typical ones you would find in any Linux system: OpenSSL, Nginx, Kernel, etc.
The backups feature makes it possible to quickly retrieve the most important Jidoteki Meta data (logs and database), and restore them on another appliance to get up and running quickly.
Of course, this release does contain a multitude of useful bug fixes and minor improvements, but nothing major like our previous releases.
During the last six months, we had our heads down pumping out feature after feature, adding new whiz-bang functionality, only to drop them a couple weeks upon completion. Why? Because focus.
One of our biggest concerns is adding features nobody will use. Since we’re also daily users of Jidometa, we quickly realized that our “new features” were not actually very useful. They definitely had a cool factor, but if we aren’t using those features daily, then they’re not very important.
Some of the features we built include: lsyncd+rsync+ssh replication, auto-update from a remote server, user and group management, S3 object data storage, kexec fast reboots, and server-side HTML page rendering.
Yes, we’ve essentially been busy spinning our wheels, but the outcome is that our Jidometa OVA remains a 60Mb download, and does its job extremely well, with no overhead or confusion.
We do plan to rehash some of those unreleased features into better and more lean implementations, but we’ll wait for the right time for that (i.e: when we see a real need for it).
At the moment, we want to focus on a Jidometa appliance which makes our customers (and our own) lives simpler, while helping us work, develop, and build faster. We’ve listened to feedback and already have a list of important features to implement, but I promise we won’t waste our time, this time around.
One of the main things to look forward to, is the ability to manage a cluster of Jidometa appliances from one central location. This would allow builds to be distributed across developer workstations, while allowing everyone to share their builds with the rest of the team. We want to provide the ability to manage the .tcz extensions uploaded to the appliance, so updating something like nodejs can be done without our intervention. Finally, we’re looking at integrating SyncThing as part of every OVA (dev option enabled), to allow developers to quickly test and iterate on their app directly in an existing appliance, without going through the full build/update/reboot/test loop (note: we’ve been doing this for over a year inside our dev Jidometa appliance, and it’s been a huge time saver).
Stay tuned for future updates.