11.12.0 Release

Production Release Date: beginning June 1, 2021

Platforms: API

Release Type: Minor

Downtime: None

Test Environments: Sandbox 10 (May 19, 2021), Sandbox 15 (May 24, 2021)


At ACME, we put emphasis on the long-term sustainability and reliability of our tech stack - we like to say “architecture is destiny”. As a result, we invested in making important updates to the API layer of our platform in this release.

 

Our definition of sustainability is measured against key values such as:

  • relevancy: keeping up to date with modern technology trends
  • maximizing uptime/performance and security
  • maximizing development productivity
  • retaining and hiring our technical talent


In that regard, we upgraded our core transactional Java application servers to be on the Spring Boot infrastructure. This infrastructure is a prerequisite for deploying more microservices, which we have deployed for non-transactional functions.


We are excited that this release enables us to hit several of our core values at once. Specifically, with respect to:

  1. Performance: our API servers will boot up twice as fast to better serve sudden traffic increases as we spin up more capacity quicker from our elastic infrastructure.
  2. Reliability: upgrading our entire API open-source dependency chains to the newer libraries so that we also pick up the latest bug fixes and improvements.
  3. Productivity and security: we are now equipped with a foundation to access the latest open source development tools and libraries occurring in the Spring Boot / microservice communities. Additionally, as we grow our technical staff and platform, we can now further break down our infrastructure into more granular services, all from the same codebase. Productivity capability examples include: better automation tools, API governance models, access to new cloud hosting services built only for microservices.
  4. Talent: skill sets in tech move fast and therefore this change helps ensure we retain and can hire very talented engineers versed in modern open-source Java stacks.