Sociall Closed Beta Release

The closed beta is here! 🎉

Published in

sociall.io

4 min readMar 28, 2018

After months of development and working overtime, the Sociall team has the platform at a state where users can start testing.

Getting Started

If you were lucky enough to be one of the first 300 registrations for the closed beta, then you now officially have access to sign up. You should have received an email a short while ago with instructions. If you did not receive the email, please make sure to check your spam folder, or wait a little while longer for the email to hit your inbox. Another reason for not receiving the email is that you may have not been within the first 300 sign ups.

To all others after the first 300, we will open the beta to the next 100 later on this week if everything goes smoothly. We will then continue to open the beta to lots of 100 every week or so, depending on how the platform handles it.

We currently have nearly 700 people who have expressed their interest to use the closed beta. All of these people will gain access to the closed beta over time.

Submitting Bugs/Issues

If you have found an issue within the platform during the beta, click on your profile picture at the top right of your screen, then click on “help” to be taken to the help center. From here, you can read our FAQs or click on the “Contact us” tab on the left side of the page.

From the “contact us” page, you will be able to select the type of enquiry (most likely being “”Reporting a bug, error or problem” in this case). Please explain the problem in detail so that the development team can replicate the issue and find a solution.

PLEASE NOTE: We are in a closed beta. There will be bugs, issues, crashes and much more. That is why we are hosting a closed beta, so that the community can help us eliminate all problems before moving the platform to a public release. There are also unfinished sections of the platform that which be fixing and adding during the beta.

Moving Forward

We will be constantly pushing new changes, fixes and improvements to the beta — usually a few times a day. If anything major is added, we will be sure to make an announcement regarding it so that the beta testers can check it out. All major updates will be made via a new development update post. Most minor updates will be made via our new Telegram announcement channel.

Load Balancing & Scaling

We are currently only running the application out of one location instead of serving it from multiple. This is so that we can have more control and so that we can monitor how the platform performs with a few active users. During this time, it is completely redundant to be serving the platform from more than one location as things get complicated and pushing out updates takes longer. Updates to the platform will be very frequent as we will be fixing bugs/errors/issues very often.

The platform may or may not crash during this time. If it does, then it can be considered a good sign. It will allow us to check out the crash logs and boot up load balancers next week to allow the platform to scale for more users as we invite more of the beta participants to join. Consider all crashes and problems a good sign during the closed beta as it’s the perfect time for it to happen.

Once we move closer to a public release, the platform will be served from multiple locations (usually the one that is closest to you) to help reduce latency and improve performance. For example, Australian users will be served from the Sydney location, Asian region will be served from Tokyo, USA from Virginia, etc.

Decentralisation

We have decided to roll out the closed beta as a single instance of our database instead of sharding across multiple locations. The main reason behind this decision is the sharding keys. Once sharding keys are set, there is almost no turning back. If the keys are incorrectly set, then this could have huge performance implications on the platform — for life. We would like to see how the closed beta performs and remove any issues, bugs, etc, and then address the sharding of our data.

The decentralisation and sharding of our data will happen during the beta. We expect this to happen mid April or sooner. We will make another announcement once this process has begun and again once it is complete.

Security

The first security audit of our systems and code will start on the 9th of April. This will continue for approximately one week. We decided to run the security audit after the beta was released so that we can have the opportunity to fix bugs and issues before handing our code over for testing.

The audit will check all of our code across all of our solutions. It will also run penetration tests on our servers, along with DDoS testing, authentication brute force testing, and much more.