New Engrave engine deployed. It’s faster and better than ever!

in #engrave5 years ago (edited)

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.

Growing resources demand of Engrave platform

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.


Originally posted on ENGRAVE Blog. Steem blog powered by ENGRAVE.

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@engrave, I've heard about this platform for first time. Good to hear that you are focusing torwards the Development. Good luck team and in my opinion Steem Journey is becoming exciting. Stay blessed. 🙂

We do believe that Steem will grow and that's why we're putting so much effort to make a project like Engrave. Feel free to test it and give us some feedback :)

Will going to checkout and will going to share my experience team. Keep up. 👍

Excited to see how all this turns out. Keep going guys!

Thank you! We're doing our best and as I wrote in the update - we are ready to handle more traffic than ever so there should be more and more news about Engrave.

Yes,I can see huge growth in this !

Posted using Partiko iOS

You were not having in-memory Caching in the beginning ?

We had an in memory-caching indeed but we developed a brand new mechanism with Redis. It's persistent now, shared between blogs instances and much more efficient as we can use Redis built-in mechanisms to manipulate data.

Footer's links to social media do not work.

It will be fixed, thanks!

This post has been included in the latest edition of SOS Daily News - a digest of all you need to know about the State of Steem.



Very excited!
I see very much potential in this project!
Hoping we steemians will have the ability to setup multiple websites on engrave which automatically shows different topics from our steem blog. :)
I would love to have a Website for all my music posts, one for my motorcycle and engine things and so on.
Normally posting on steem, entering a tag and not having to do more :D

Posted using Partiko Android

Hoping we steemians will have the ability to setup multiple websites

Soon. New architecture introduced a few days ago will allow us to do that quite quickly :)

I would love to have a Website for all my music posts, one for my motorcycle and engine things and so on.

This is our goal, to give our users the ability to differentiate their content across multiple domains/blogs.

Normally posting on steem, entering a tag and not having to do more :D

Categories functionality on Engrave will be much more powerful than tags on Steem. But we still need some good feedback from users and some time to develop a proper solution for that. Stay tuned!

Ha!
Then I realised your project's potential already when you introduced it! :)
Really looking forward!
Can I support you somehow?

Posted using Partiko Android

Just play around with Engrave dashboard and give us some feedback ;) This is what we need actually. We want to make it as good as possible but we need real users and information from them ;)

Here is some:
I cant enter https://engrave.website/dashboard/posts

What's going on actually? Does it loads infinitely long or redirects to Dashboard? Can't see anything in logs...

For me it redirects to dashboard..

Posted using Partiko Android

So actually you are saying only authors can log in and be a reader?
Looking forward to the next post.

Posted using Partiko Android

No, everyone can read your blog but interaction with a blog (commenting and voting article directly from your block) is disabled for the next few days.

I love the Engrave platform, but as a constructive criticism, the inability to log into a blog directly is a huge problem, unless its just a temporary issue. If its a future design feature I'd suggest against it.

This means that for my company's posts to be rewarded with upvotes they have to go to Engrave first to sign up. Maybe you think that's good for exposure for Engrave, but this is a huge problem for bloggers. Huge enough for many to stick with wordpress.

I would change that as soon as you can. Because as much as I like Engrave, that's a deal breaker for me.

This is of course just a temporary issue. We're developing a brand new mechanism to login into blogs which will enable cross-blog authentication. It will be even more useful for your readers than before because when someone will log in once, he will be logged in to every blog on the Engrave platform. This is just because we totally changed the technical way to render blogs.

Logging directly on blogs is one of our most valuable features and it won't be abandoned, don't worry ;)

I am enjoying using the #engrave blog for my posts. Thanks for all your hard work 🙏

Posted using Partiko iOS

Thanks :) Stay tuned for our new dashboard :)

Thanks. I do have one issue when I am writing and that is that when you use the CAPS for a letter it doesn’t automatically turn of in the main body text area. In the title section it is fine. Not sure if it’s just cos I’m using my iPad or not. Thanks again for your upgrade I look forward to having a drive