Friday, October 17, 2008

Upcoming service break for infrastructure upgrade

We’re planning to take Jaiku offline for an infrastructure upgrade between 10:00 am - 12:00 pm Pacific Standard Time (6:00 pm and 8:00 pm GMT) on Friday, October 17. The reason for the break is we’ll be undergoing a hardware expansion in our data center.

This is good news, because the upgrade will improve reliability of our infrastructure and significantly increase the bandwidth we have at our disposal.

The downtime is expected to last between 30 minutes and 2 hours. We apologize for the inconvenience and will be doing our best to minimize the disruption.

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Short SMS maintenance break

Update: the issue with our SMS provider (see details) has now been solved and the SMS service is functional again worldwide. Thanks for your patience!

Folks, our SMS provider has let us know they will be performing maintenance on their system on Tuesday, June 10th, between 00:00 - 06:00 AM Central European time. This is going to affect the Jaiku SMS services worldwide. We’re expecting two short outages within this time period. Our provider’s assured us they’ll do their best to minimize the disturbance.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

We’re back, and invitations are now unlimited

As many of you know, we’ve been offline for the last few days, working to address an issue with a server. We’re back, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience.

We’ve now moved Jaiku to a Google data center. This is something that we’d planned to do anyway, as part of our future transition to Google App Engine. Now that we’ve moved, we’ll need to ask you to review and accept a new terms of service and privacy policy. Head here to do that.

As a special thank you for your patience, we’d like to throw a little nest-warming party and open unlimited invitations for Jaiku.

We appreciate your support!

Monday, August 18, 2008

From the Dev Corner: An Under-The-Hood Preview of Our New Engine

It’s been a while since we’ve given an update on the progress of the porting of Jaiku to Google App Engine, and many of you have been keen to know how work is progressing.

It’s as if we were retrofitting a locomotive with a powerful new engine. Everything under the classic body gets upgraded.

Just like on the inside the locomotive is composed of a drive train, transmission, and so on, Jaiku is composed of services for features like fetching Web feeds, receiving and sending SMS, the IM bot, and Jaiku Mobile. We’re reimplementing them all so that they work well with the App Engine. In some cases we’re expanding the App Engine platform itself. We’re taking the opportunity to learn from porting Jaiku to benefit both our users and make App Engine better.

The port to App Engine will also benefit third-party developers who are writing cool applications for Jaiku. In the process of rewriting Jaiku’s Web site on Django, we’re improving the way the site is written so 3rd party developers will have greater control over the system and can write applications that provide richer features to their users.

Those who’ve payed attention know how excited we are about open Web standards like OAuth, Microformats, and OpenID. The port to AppEngine is an opportunity to add more support for them to the Jaiku platform and contribute back to the community by implementing support for the standards we love. For example, the new Jaiku API will support OAuth.

The biggest benefit for the Jaiku community is that we’ll be able to grow and support many more users. Where before we used MySQL, now we’re using the more scalable App Engine data store and an improved data model. We’ll be moving existing users’ data to the new architecture to make sure Jaiku scales up for you and all your friends.

So, where are we now? We’re putting the finishing touches on the entire system. As any developer knows, sometimes there are surprises, so we’ll periodically let you know how things are progressing.

We appreciate your patience and can’t wait to open up Jaiku to everyone!

Web server outage

Update: All services are now up and running again. According to our data center provider, the power failure that affected Jaiku this Sunday was caused by the meltdown of a mains switch and disrupted the servers of over 8,000 customers.

A power failure at about 9am PST (7pm EET) today at the data center provider where Jaiku’s servers are located caused an outage on jaiku.com. We are back up and running, but it will take some more time before all services are fully operational. We apologize for the service break and are working to get all functions back to normal as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!

Friday, May 30, 2008

Making progress

Recently a bunch of you have been ruminating about the fate of Jaiku. We know. It is frustrating. We believe the migration to Google App Engine will result in improved stability, so we made the hard call to invest all of our effort in finishing up the port rather than do what was needed to keep up our old servers up to date (it is hard to keep up a service of this scale with 1GB RAM…).

Also, contrary to some voices out there, we DO have plans for future development and we will involve our developer community as much as we can. Just to reiterate, we are working very hard to ensure you have a useful and usable service. We feel the short term pain, too. Thanks for sticking with us!

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Wroom - we’re moving to Google App Engine

We’ve been working quietly for a while to port Jaiku to Google infrastructure. Today we’re taking off our welding goggles to announce Jaiku will be one of the first apps to run on the new Google App Engine.

The Google App Engine enables applications to leverage powerful Google technologies and scale up to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.

Jaiku will be fully deployed on the Google App Engine in the near future. Andy & co. are working hard to ensure the port is a success and we will make a further announcement once the port has been completed.