Monthly Archives: October 2021

AL Object ID Ninja Scheduled Maintenance Announcement: October 9 at 19:00 CET

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For all of you using AL Object ID Ninja, please read this post. There will be scheduled maintenance of AL Object ID Ninja back end on October 9, 2021, at 19:00 CET (UTC +2). The expected downtime is 30 minutes. During the maintenance, you will not be able to use AL Object ID Ninja to assign object IDs.

Behavior during the maintenance

During the maintenance, the back end will send the 503 Service Unavailable response to all requests. When AL Object ID Ninja receives this status, it will show a message like this:

What is this maintenance about?

In my previous post, I explained the reasons for the maintenance that is going to happen this week. After weighing in and out several approaches, I have come up with a plan slightly different than what I announced in the previous post. So, during this maintenance, the following is going to happen:

  • All existing app information will be moved from a Standard-tier Block Blob container to a Premium-tier Block Blob container. This will provide a slightly better performance, and will reduce the costs by roughly 47%. Standard-tier costs less for volume of stored data, but more per transaction, and since Ninja is using low storage volume with high transaction count, the cost reduction will be substantial.
  • All blobs belonging to an individual app will be consolidated into a single app blob. In “v1” app information is spread around multiple individual blobs which allows slightly faster performance and lower access concurrency. However, benchmarking has shown that there is no substantial performance benefit to existing approach as compared to single-blob-per-app approach. Furthermore, since the back end already correctly handles concurrent access and since chances of actual concurrent write are microscopical, not much is gained by spreading app data across multiple blobs. The overall benefit of having a single blob is substantial, as there will be far less blob read operations as compared to the current situation.
  • After the migration is completed, a new version of back end will be deployed that will return the 410 Gone response to all “v1” requests. This version will have “v2” endpoints available.
  • When the migration starts, a new version of AL Object ID Ninja (2.0.0) will be deployed that will access new “v2” endpoints.

What do you need to do?

After the maintenance completes, you should update AL Object ID Ninja extension as soon as possible. For most of you, this will happen automatically. To make sure everything is ready, verify that AL Object ID Ninja is updated to 1.2.8 in your instance of Visual Studio Code before you first start working after the maintenance.

IMPORTANT (if you have your own back end)

Some of you are using your own back end. I will push the new version of the back end to GitHub latest on Thursday evening. Please keep an eye on the repository. When you see a commit about back end “v2”, pull the changes and deploy them at any point after the scheduled maintenance starts, but before your developers start using AL Object ID Ninja (probably on Monday morning).

Continue ReadingAL Object ID Ninja Scheduled Maintenance Announcement: October 9 at 19:00 CET

Important Announcement for AL Object ID Ninja

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If you are using AL Object ID Ninja already then you may want to read this post. If not, then first install AL Object ID Ninja, then read this post 😀

Since its launch three weeks ago, this extension has exploded far beyond my expectations. As of this morning, Ninja has been installed 5.916 times, there are 2.047 Business Central apps that use Ninja to assign object IDs, and there are currently around 13.37 million blob read and write operations per week performed on my Azure Storage and around 6.75 million Azure Function calls per day. These numbers nearly doubled in the past ten days, and while there is a definite cap to how far this can grow, I expect all of this to grow at a steady rate for the foreseeable future.

Which brings me to the important part. AL Object ID Ninja is free, and it will stay free. Right now there is absolutely no fear of it even remotely approaching the limit I’ve set (at the moment, Ninja is costing on average €1 per day against my €125 monthly allowance that comes with my Visual Studio subscription, so there is aaaaaa lot of room to grow. However, since Ninja grew beyond my wildest dreams already, and since I know it’s far from hitting the roof any time soon, if nothing changes, in a couple of months it could hit a €3 per day threshold that would make me pretty uncomfortable.

That said, I have been working on some important back-end improvements to keep costs (much) lower while providing even more functionality. The reason why I went there wasn’t costs at all – it was actually some new functionality I wanted to add that I realized would drive costs a bit up, so I had to do something.

All of this is to finally announce this important announcement: at some point during the weekend, there will be a major upgrade to the AL Object ID Ninja back end, and over the course of the next week there will be two new versions of AL Object ID Ninja extension. The old extension will not work with new back end, and new extension will not work with old back end.

That’s it. If you care about nitty-gritty details, then read on.

Continue ReadingImportant Announcement for AL Object ID Ninja