New Generation Affino SaaS Stack

This time last year we launched Affino 8 in what was the biggest move forward for the Affino SaaS in a decade. This year we’re moving Affino to an entirely new hosting architecture and app stack, in what is the biggest advance in Affino’s architecture in six years.

5th Generation Amazon AWS Services

The single biggest change we’re making is the move to Amazon’s latest generation AWS Services. These provide a host of great improvements in terms of performance, scalability and reliability.

The single biggest target, which we have achieved, has been to remove all the potential single points of failure from how the Affino SaaS service is delivered. This means that all the infrastructure servers are now replaced with Amazon’s AWS services and workspaces. We still run some for development and monitoring purposes, but essentially we no longer manage servers for anything from file serving, to search, databases, messaging, DDoS protection, and much more.

This means that with the move to the new architecture the Affino service is on a fundamentally more solid level than it has ever been.

Latest Generation App Stack

We have also updated to the latest generation for all the underlying software platforms we’re using, including for our lightweight disposable application servers.

This means that we have future-proofed the current generation service and overall Affino 8 platform to the fullest extent, whilst we continue to iterate it over the coming years.

The Future - Affino 9 and beyond

We have already started thinking about what lies ahead for Affino 9, and in essence the goal is to be fully serverless, open source framework driven, and likely focused around Python on AWS for the underlying core Affino SaaS architecture.

We have had Python and a host of great development frameworks in mind for some time now (especially with AI being a key focus), and whilst both Microsoft and Google are doing some very interesting work, we are finding that Amazon AWS is still very much on the vanguard where we need it to be.

There’s still everything to be decided, but it’s an exciting time to say the least.

Migrating to the new Service

You can already experience the new Affino SaaS service when you visit www.Affino.com. We have been tuning Affino on it for the past week, and have a compatibility release coming out on Monday 4th February which irons out all the issues we’ve been having, across a host of sites and dozens of service tests we’ve been running.

We have been testing the new architecture over the past couple of years, with an increased focus since August 2018, and the entire development setup has been running on much of it for the past six months.

There is a two week window now when we’ll be migrating all Affino sites to the new setup. It’s important to note that there is going to be downtime for all your sites, the length of which depends primarily on how many files / data you have, as we need to move all of it into the new secure cloud, and it is taking time in each instance.

The Affino team will be in touch to liaise with you for the move. Note that there is a small amount of flexibility in the scheduling, and you can decide if the move happens during the day or overnight, but all sites will be migrated at the same time (staging and live) for each organisation over the coming fortnight.