Functionality and simplicity are often competing priorities when building software. It’s all too easy to introduce undesirable complexity alongside new functionality. Additionally, simplification often requires experience leveraging functionality in order to build enough context and perspective to effectively streamline that functionality. This often leads to a cyclical pattern in software development: we add functionality, analyze its use, and identify potential areas for simplification.
With the launch of Kinetic Request CE and https://kinops.io, there was a lot of energy put into the introduction of functionality needed for these offerings. A great deal of attention was put into keeping functionality as simple to use as possible, but there have been some important opportunities for further simplification identified in the time since their release. Many of these opportunities fit within a larger initiative to provide a singular, simplified interface into the components that make up the platform.
In order to address this initiative, we have been working on a “Platform” admin console that combines the interfaces used by our Kinetic Request CE, BridgeHub, FileHub, and Task components into one unified administration experience. Additionally, if an environment has multiple BridgeHub or Task services (which can be common when the platform is installed in a “hybrid cloud” pattern), the console is capable of aggregating the information into one place.
Also part of this initiative are changes necessary to expose a consolidated view of platform component log content. The Kinetic Platform is designed to be extremely scalable. This scalability complicates logging practices since the content is spread between a dynamically scaling number of component instances. The Platform Consoles will include a view into the aggregated content, and allow filtering down to log entries caused by a specific user or individual request.
In addition to the Platform Console initiative, we have been working on an initiative to simplify the technical administration of the platform. Historically, functionality like high availability (through disasters and upgrades) and auto-scaling has been applied to the platform, rather than part of the platform itself. Moving forward, we want to solve these challenges for customers maintaining their own environments and move those capabilities directly into the platform.
Stay tuned for upcoming articles on how Kinetic Data is tackling the challenges of log content aggregation and platform administration!
Cassy Lueneburg