This will be a quick note, much more detailed one will be posted in a few days. It's been around one and a half month from the latest update but the development process of Engrave hasn't stopped. In fact, we just deployed an extremely important update to make the entire platform better and faster. It is a significant change as it will be more stable and user-friendly and it will allow us to introduce brand new mechanisms even faster than we previously thought.
Engrave userbase was growing from the first day. Resources demands were rising literally every hour. We had to make sure that we will be able to handle constantly growing traffic.
That's why we were quite in the last months and so. This might sound silly but we tried to not become too popular too quickly. We were simultaneously fixing problems with old architecture to meet authors needs and problems and we worked on a very new one.
Microservices
From the very beginning, Engrave was developed as a big, monolithic application and after few months with hundreds of new users, it all came clear that it's not a sustainable way to go. There was a day that Engrave failed in the middle of the night. We had to switch to microservices. And we did.
Roughly 85% of the original code was rewritten from scratch to make entire new architecture possible. We've split Engrave application into smaller pieces that have only one single responsibility. If one of those pieces fails, the entire platform will stay alive and work fine.
Caching with Redis
New architecture dramatically decreases network and CPU usage so we can update blogs and articles definitely more often than before. Newly added articles will appear on your blog almost instantly and every upvote will become visible in seconds.
Small inconvenience for readers
There is a small inconvenience for blog's readers. It the upcoming few days blogs readers won't be able to interact with content directly from blogs. We've disabled the way to login into blogs using Steem account (you can only login to Engrave as an author).
This change might we considered as a step back, but in reality, it is a giant step forward. The new architecture allows us to do a cross-domain authentication, which means that if you login into one of the blogs, you will be automatically logged in into every other. This will be a huge change as previously readers had to log in on each blog independently!
Stay tuned
We're going to post a more detailed article about both old and new architecture. And from this point, we are ready to grow big. And we will take care about our bloggers biggest problems right now.