Pagoda Box Update

Or, how sojourning in the desert longer than planned lead to the fruitful oasis.

Two months ago, we were nearing the final stages of our v2 kernel. The new kernel is chock full of goodies ranging from automated scaling, better analytics, a beautiful UI, event notifications, component traffic visualization, live log streaming–sweet mother of nectar!–the list goes on. We are unbelievably excited to put the new kernel into your hands, and anticipate doing so very soon.

So why the &#!$@ is it taking so long?!

Well, that’s a good question. Parallel to our kernel release, our infrastructure has been growing at a substantial rate and thus placing strain on our server management processes. We subscribe to a dev-ops philosophy, believing problems should be solved via software rather than temporary config hacks or by adding additional admins. We knew a solid meta structure would bring tremendous benefits as we continued to grow, but it would also take time to build. This meant a difficult decision. Do we release our kernel update (likely increasing our rate of infrastructure growth) or do we implement a better system for managing infrastructure responsibly and sustainably?

We chose the latter, investing our time and resources to satisfy the foundational provisioning challenges of a growing infrastructure before releasing the v2 kernel. After extensive exploration, we ended up forging our own modular, push model server provisioning system built on the backs of projects like git, chef, berkshelf, capistrano, hubot, vagrant, puppet and others. Our new system provides a dead simple server configuration workflow without sacrificing flexibility or power (think Vagrant for servers). We will be open sourcing this project in the upcoming months.

While it has been quite painful to postpone our kernel rollout, our team is already seeing productivity gains in the form of faster, stabler, and more unified rollouts. We’re happy to report that we have returned our full focus to the v2 kernel. We are already deploying test apps to the new kernel, and are nearing the beta phase announced in October.

We appreciate your patience; look forward to additional updates in the coming weeks. We’re very much still alive!