July 2020 Update
Our focus in July was mainly on service hardening, along with a handy product update around notification rule.
Product Updates
This month we added a new property value comparison rule for notifications - value has changed. This rule is helpful for users who want to be notified when a task's property value has changed from the last execution's value, and not be notified when the property value remains unchanged.
Before this change, users who are tracking a constantly changing property value has to manually update the target value in the notification condition form, to keep the monitor rule relevant, which can be tedious.
For example, a website owner wants to get notified when a new user registers for his website. Previously he can achieve this by creating a scheduled task that calls the website's user count API, and set up a notification rule like below:
This way the user can receive a notification once the count increases. Though he will have to maintain the Target Value to keep the notification rule relevant. Now with the new change, he can use the value has changed option, sit back, and let iHook task do its work:
Infrastructure Updates
This month we added a secondary email vendor to ensure email notification deliverability in case of primary email vendor outage. On July 28th, our primary email vendor was experiencing a major service outage where email deliveries were significantly delayed or rejected for 6+ hours. Fortunately, we've had our failover mechanism in place and delivered our email notifications via the backup vendor. Infrastructure redundancy is very important to ensure service availability. We'll keep investing in this area to make our service more resilient. Next, we'll explore providing backup service for the following components:
- Primary database
- Cron scheduler
- Task worker
- SMS notification service
- Server monitoring tool
Ops Updates
On the ops side, to better protect us against hacking activities, we revisited all of our cloud infrastructure vendors' account security settings and enabled MFA for those that haven't yet. This would add a bit more friction during login, but the security benefit is well worth it.
Also, we updated our system health check API permission checking logic, such that we can use less privileged API keys in our 3rd party monitor tool, to minimize the security impact in case our API credentials get leaked.
Thank You
Thank you for reading, and thank you for your trust with iHook. If you have any feedback, please don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected], we look forward to hearing from you!