Beaconpush

Changes to On-Site edition

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 10:40:39 +0100

We have previously offered Beaconpush in two editions - cloud and on-site. The latter has been packaged software to be housed inside your data center, primarily offered for larger installations or where privacy has been a concern.

While On-Site edition has proven itself to be stable and reliable technology, we've decided to end our offering of this edition due to shortage in demand. If you’re a user of On-Site, you’ll be contacted through e-mail with more details.

Worth mentioning also is that our Cloud service was closed September 1 as communicated since February. But rather than abruptly pulling the plug, we want to ensure a smooth transition for all of our users that have trusted us through the years. We advise you to set up or move to another similar service. Do note that Cloud edition is no longer officially supported. If you have any questions what this means for you, please contact support@beaconpush.com.

ESN acquired by EA

The company behind Beaconpush, ESN, has been acquired by Electronic Arts (EA).

Already four years ago during the first steps of the development of Battlefield 3 DICE (an EA studio) and ESN had a common vision of how social and web centric gaming would change the business. Since then we’ve worked close together and this deal was the next natural step.

The next step for us is to move forward on all the platforms which Battlefield is released on, focusing on a deeper integration between the actual game and the social interfaces which makes the game even more engaging when playing together with friends.

For more details and what this means, see the ESN web site.

Discontinuation of cloud plan

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:45:00 +0100

For two years we’ve helped users real-time enabling their sites with
push messages. During this time, tons of messages have been delivered and overall feedback has nothing but positive. While we are very humbled and thankful for this interest in our cloud service we have come to a crossroad.

We have made the decision to discontinue the cloud hosted Beaconpush service in order to focus on the On-Site hosted Beaconpush product. This decision is in line with the increased demand and changed customer profile we’ve seen during the past 6 months.

All existing customers are offered a migration path to the On-Site product for continued service. Please visit beaconpush.com to read more about the benefits. Existing cloud customers are offered a discounted On-Site version when migrating.

Migration schedule

Disabling of Cloud plan upgrade - March 1st 2012
Existing Cloud plan customers may continue to use the cloud hosted Beaconpush service as before. New and existing customers may no longer upgrade their accounts to the Cloud plan.

Shutdown of service - September 1st 2012

All customers have migrated from the cloud service to the On-site product. Developer and Cloud plans are discontinued at 00:00 UTC.

Does this concern me?

If you are on the Cloud plan and would like to continue using Beaconpush after September 1st 2012 you will need to migrate. If not, your plan will simply be terminated and you will not be charged any more.

How do I migrate?
Please visit the On-Site page and sign-up. We’ll get back to you with pricing and instructions how to migrate. On-Site’s REST API is identical with that of the cloud service for easy and smooth migration. If you have any questions about this don’t hesitate to contact me.

If you have further questions regarding this change, send a mail to support@beaconpush.com.

Beaconpush powers Battlefield 3’s Battlelog

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 11:11:00 +0100

As subcontractor to EA DICE, ESN is a technology provider and has played a key role in the design and development of the Battlelog web and voice experience.

Battlelog is Battlefield 3’s web-based hub for interacting with friends, launching games, comparing progress and statistics and engaging with the community.

According to EA, the game has sold over 5 million copies. Gamers all over the world are enjoying the latest creation from the Stockholm-based game developer DICE. Such incredible popularity also means an enormous amount of users, right from the start. Despite that, we can in hindsight say that Beaconpush has delivered on all expectations, and beyond.

On-site Edition

Today we’re also proud to announce the on-site edition of Beaconpush. This edition is an alternative hosting model than that in the the cloud-hosted version in the sense that you host the Beaconpush server(s) within your own data center. Granting you more flexibility and control over hardware, upgrades and costs. For medium and large web sites, this is often the preferred hosting model.

This edition also comes with the possibility of dedicated support SLAs. Bringing a level of confidence that your installation will work as intended and also that any issues arising will be resolved quickly. If you’d like to know more, check out the on-site page on the site.

Worth mentioning is also that Beaconpush’s sister product, Sonar, is also powering Battlelog. It brings a seamless VoIP experience across web, desktop and game.

Outage last Thursday

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:12:00 +0100

Last Thursday we had an outage as some of you did notice. These types of failures are never pleasing and we always strive to keep this kind downtime to a minimum. The service was then later the same day restored to normal operation.

The reason for this was capacity issues, where the load was too much for the systems to handle. This then caused a ripple effect with the API server that was serving the REST API calls.

To prevent this from happening again we’ve improved our ability to restore the systems faster, added better monitoring of our services and increased the capacity. In the unlikely case of this happening again, the downtime caused by any issue would be minimal.

We always try to be upfront when issues like this happen, both on Twitter and our support forum on Get Satisfaction. Hiding or sweeping issues like this under the carpet is not how we roll. We hope you understand.

Load time improvements

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 10:36:00 +0100

To provide even lower load times of our JavaScript and Flash clients, we now serve files through a CDN. This will greatly improve the load times for end-users using the Beaconpush service. It will also help reduce the load of our normal servers, making sure they do one and only thing well: push messages in real-time!

The new location of the JavaScript client is:

http://cdn.beaconpush.com/clients/client-1.js

We recommend you link this file directly from your site and not host it yourself. This will ensure you’ll receive all updates and bug fixes made, without having to download and re-sync this file.

The CDN is powered by Amazon’s reliable CloudFront service. And with it’s many content servers around the world, downloading of the Beaconpush client should be blazingly fast, no matter where your users are located.

Together with these improvements we’ve also received a new contribution to our list of open-source clients. Namely, a new REST API client for node.js. Will make things even easier for developers using the very popular JavaScript platform to create real-time web sites.

Connection issues

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 10:28:00 +0100

During this week we’ve had issues with connections not getting through to our servers. These issues have been dealt with and operations are returning back to normal. Read below for a more detailed recap of what happened.

Things started last weekend when we experienced a sudden surge in traffic to us, essentially increasing tenfold. At most we handled close to 50 million requests during 24 hours, that’s a lot of traffic. This came a bit unexpected as we’ve up to this point seen very stable growth and not huge spikes. The latter is a “positive” problem as it means our service is popular. But being popular also means our service must try functioning flawlessly, regardless of (potentially) huge sources of traffic coming in.

A bit of investigation of where this traffic was coming from revealed however something interesting. It turned out it wasn’t all unique users putting in this load. After contacting the customer responsible for sending this traffic, we we’re able identify what caused this massive load spike. The customer issued some changes and we’re starting to see a drop in number of requests hitting Beaconpush.

But in the end, our servers didn’t hold up to this load of sudden requests coming in. And we take this very seriously, we can’t simply allow these kind of interruptions. To prevent this from happening again we’ve made some changes to our architecture. Most importantly, we moved our reverse proxy to a separate machine. It used to share the same machine as our messaging server, responsible for splitting Web Socket from HTTP traffic. This is also why you’ve seen our calls on changing the server hostnames (to server1.beaconpush.com for the JavaScript client).

The reason we’ve waited with switching this server was make to sure everyone of our users had changed their hostnames. We didn’t want to have an interruption from this either. But the inconvenient situation with the connections and our previous calls about changing the hostnames made us confident that this was the right time for the switch over.

With our server switch over and the customer issued change, things are now being stabilized. And as mentioned earlier, traffic is dropping back to normal levels.

If you still have questions about this, use our support forum or contact support@beaconpush.com.

Thanks for your patience.

Password reset feature

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 08:00:07 +0100

A much suggested feature has arrived in form of password reset. Retrieving your lost password is quite easy, simply use the link from the Login popup and take it from there. Instructions will follow.

As always, if you have any issues with this, use our support forums. A swift response is always promised.

Change in counting of delivered messages

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:10:12 +0100

When you send a message to the REST API, that message gets delivered to a number of users. Sending one message to one channel can result in delivery to multiple recipients (aka a fan-out). This depends on how many people are currently listening to that channel.

Up until now, we’ve always counted delivered messages as one message, no matter how many it got delivered to in practice. Reason for this was testing and making sure our services held up to our quality expectations. As part of Beacon maturing and moving out of this beta phase, we will change this to actually count the real number of recipients delivered to.

So if you see that your number of delivered messages have gone up, don’t fear. It’s just counting the real number of deliveries rather than a fixed number.