In the latest in our series on version 3.0, our VP of Technology explains some of the technical changes to our site.
This blog post may not be what you are used to; I’m not a marketing, sales, or social media person–I’m a technology guy. As such, I like to “geek out” on the internals of how things work and inevitably break them; or, in some cases, fix them (or both).
As some of our previous blog posts have mentioned, Version 3 of our web application was launched recently. It is a huge improvement over previous versions in every way. We have additional server, network, and storage capacity, a more user-friendly interface, and a more flexible code base. It is not perfect but we continue to enhance the user experience as we take another look at the interface and receive feedback from our users.
Some recent noteworthy changes in the last week are:
- Vault users with “full access” permissions can revoke themselves as long as they are not the vault owner.
- Deleting a vault folder will delete all files/folders in it. Previously, you had to delete contents manually before removing a folder.
- The vault listing view has a new layout that makes it easier to determine how it works.
- A new upload progress bar shows you how long uploads are taking to complete.
- A new spinning graphic to the right of the vault name to indicate activity.
- User notifications and error messages are more specific.
- The web server’s SSL configuration has been strengthened to provide more secure communications with us. Specifically, the Heartbleed Bug has been remediated.
- Cross-browser compatibility enhancements.
I saved all the specific techie stuff for last so as not to bore non-technical readers:
SSL Configuration (apps.traklight.com)
- We updated our OpenSSL libraries to those that provide a patch for the Heartbleed issue mentioned above.
- We included algorithms to provide an SSL protocol feature called Forward Secrecy.
Server Environment
We added separate environments for development, staging, and production. This brings our infrastructure investment to 13 servers–8 for production. The environments are scalable via VMware technology so adding additional capacity can be done quickly and without taking the application offline. The production environment is both fault-tolerant and redundant. The servers reside on a private, dual-10GbE network with dual-40GbE Infiniband connections to their respective storage devices. Our current disk capacity is 1TB of AES-encrypted storage.
I’ll be writing every month to let you know about our latest updates, so keep checking back!
