Full steam ahead in 2016
Brand-new Macs about to join their many siblings in the data centre. Think integration day, for computers.
Some people ring in the new year with party streamers and silly string. For 2016, we chose nylon ties and CAT6 cables, as the holidays marked the beginning of the largest technology upgrade cycle in the history of Fluxiom. As our clients’ businesses grow in numerous and exciting ways, so does ours. With ever more files on Fluxiom, ever more images on Maiko, and ever more client sites to run, we felt the time had come to step up our game in a big way.
All-new platform
Our commitment to privacy and security runs deep. Our brand-new platform continues to be designed, operated, and maintained in-house using the latest Apple hardware for optimal reliability and efficiency. We never outsource client data to opaque clouds, and take full responsibility for its safekeeping.
Each layer of our stack will now run on multiple dedicated machines, without wasting a drop of power on virtualisation. Hot spares and bespoke deployment recipes will empower us to face the unpredictable, from hardware failures to overnight sensations, by bringing up additional equipment at any time, in a matter of minutes.
These new, turbo-charged servers will run the latest major Ruby and Rails versions. Over the next six months, we will progressively upgrade every app we maintain to the very latest iteration of these fast-moving technologies, enabling us to squeeze every drop of power and reliability from the new hardware.
The new platform is already up and running and undergoing the final tests. We will be moving client services transparently to the new setup over the coming few weeks, as the old platform progressively winds down.
End of support for older browsers
On 12 January 2016, Microsoft stopped supporting older versions of Internet Explorer. While we are not yet ready to take such drastic steps, we will stop supporting IE 7–9 on 1 March 2016.
Older versions of Explorer are not only fundamentally insecure, they also lack support for the modern web technologies we need to introduce new features and interfaces. Supporting these older and marginal browsers means withholding improvements from everybody, which we feel is not an acceptable trade-off.
While we won’t lock out anybody by design, we will stop testing new releases against these browsers. For their own security and peace of mind, we encourage all our customers to upgrade to supported versions of Explorer or cross-grade to browsers like Chrome and Firefox today. Our support team is ready to assist you in this effort.
We remain committed to supporting every platform we can, so long as it does not endanger stability or security. Therefore, we shall continue to support the last two versions of Safari, Chrome, and Firefox on all platforms, as well as Internet Explorer 10 and 11 on Windows.
Summary
- Fluxiom is upgrading all its software and hardware
- The upgrade will be fully transparent to end-users
- Exciting new features will launch in the second half of 2016
- Support for Internet Explorer 7–9 will end on 1 March