Wow, it's been 4 months since our last update, time flies.
We have been mostly idling since we got a big influx of new users earlier this year.
We have primarily been focused on service uptime and refactoring how some of our services work in order to handle the uptick in usage.
In particular, we switched from using minio to our own custom built fs
storage adapter. This resulted in a dramatic increase in service reliability. It
also made it easier for us to develop against our services since we don't have a
hard dependency on minio. This is not because minio is necessarily
ineffecient, rather, it is designed for distributed object storage and that's a
feature we don't really need at this point. That's not to say we won't ever need
to move back to a distributed object storage service in the future and we made
sure that our fs adapter was fully compatible if we ever do need to switch
again. But overall we don't have to touch our prod services as much and object
response times have improved. Success!
Now that we don't rely on minio for object storage, we also decided to spend
some time making it easier to self-host pgs.sh. It's still a work-in-progress
but we are at the point where anyone can quickly get pgs running themselves
with 95% of the same feature-set (we don't have a great way to enable site
analytics). If you are interested in self-hosting pgs you can find our guide
here: https://github.com/picosh/pgs
Let us know if you run into any issues!
We have been slowly chatting about what we want to work on next. When thinking
about our design principles inside of
rfc-001 and what we could build next, we
keep coming back to building a compute service. We are reluctant to enter this
PaaS space because it is over-crowded and a race-to-the-bottom in terms of
pricing. We already have a working prototype, codenamed picolo: a small
instrument for deploying containers. We will post an rfc as we iron
out the features.
Finally, we are working on a new authentication/authorization mechanism for
pico that would enable teams to work on our platform:
rfc-007. Let us know what you think!
I think that covers most of what we have been working on lately. Cya!