New Thinger.io Free IoT Platform Release

The free server has been hosted since the very beginning of the project to give the developer community the perfect support for learning and developing IoT projects with this technology. This new version updates the functionalities of the public server to match some features offered in the professional license. The main goal: to keep offering up-to-date technology, and to show developers the full potential of the platform just by signing up.

The HTTP Device Type is perfect for connecting Sigfox Callbacks, LoRaWAN backends, or any other HTTP client device; how devices connect today, protocol by protocol, is on the device connectivity page. The device dashboard and the HTML widget build on the dashboards of the console.

Most of the new features are focused on improving platform flexibility, trying not to limit the creativity of community developers.

Some of these improvements also affect the firmware of the devices, and cannot be used until it is updated in the next release: functions to work with the properties, confirmation of writing data in buckets, and functionalities to make use of the remote console.

Some of these features are reserved for private instances, since they are aimed at professional use cases that need to manage a network of users or adapt the web console to a particular brand (today, White Label / OEM). Plugins are also limited to these instances, as deploying them requires extra computational load that cannot be managed in the freemium infrastructure.

However, if a maker needs a plugin for a project, there is a Cloud Maker Instance license that allows these features: it can be deployed within minutes, at a very contained price.

As published in May 2020. Plugins live today in the Marketplace, over-the-air updates in fleet management, and a private instance is a Private Cloud server; current plans on the pricing page.

A curious fun fact: until now, our 50,000 users were running over a single AWS instance that was really a very basic host, with 1 GB of RAM and 1 core. With these resources it was always at 2% of its capacity, so we did not see the need to upgrade it.

However, a more reliable service for our community users needed a modern infrastructure. We have deployed a Thinger.io cluster with 5 nodes distributed over different continents. This minimizes access latency, especially for users from the United States and Asia, and improves the overall user experience. We also migrated our main MongoDB database to a new cluster in MongoDB Atlas, for better performance and reliability.

We will discuss in depth the capabilities of the platform for professional uses later on. If you have come this far, this is probably of great interest to you: please let us know what you think about the new changes.