Affino 9 introduces the next generation of the Affino SaaS Service. This year has seen the biggest technical shift in Affino for over a decade, and after thirty five updates to Affino 8 we are introducing the first version of Affino 9. It is a radical shift to a new generation of open source technologies with a firm AI and Open Source foundation.

2023 has been an exciting year and feels like the coming of age for AI as a Service (AaaS) and together with the rapid maturity of AI foundational technologies including Langchain and vector databases, we are seeing the biggest and most radical shift since the introduction of cloud computing. We are entering an era of AI enhanced productivity across the board, so embracing AI technology such as LLMs (large language models) and Vector Databases has become fundamental to how future applications will be developed.

In many ways we started this journey years ago with the adoption of Python as one of our primary programming languages, and increasingly built Affino on a serverless architecture for many of our new services including our Affino Analytics Dashboard. So many technologies have coalesced to usher in the AI age and we have ensured that Affino has the firm foundation to do so with the launch of Affino 9.

For more details please see the release notes:

https://www.affino.com/blogs/social-commerce-blog/affino-901---the-next-generation-tech-update

The single biggest challenge for existing Affino users will be the switch over to the new service architecture. Because of the size of the shift our primary goal with the Affino 9.0.1 update is to change as little as possible in the Control Centre and Display side experiences, with the major new features kept for future updates. Instead the goal is to support the Affino community to ensure that all your business critical workflows, management interfaces, and user experiences are as close to identical before and after.

To aid with the transition to Affino 9, we will provide dedicated Affino 9 Staging services for all migrations, along with the Affino team being on-hand to guide and support with the transition.

Once you are up and running on Affino 9 you will benefit from the major AI, Commercial, Publishing and Next Generation Control Centre updates we will be bringing to you over the coming year, for what will be a transformed Affino service.