FileMaker Sync - Worldwide Replication & OffLine Sync
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FileMaker Sync - Worldwide Replication & OffLine Sync - Jesse Barnum - Day 1
FileMaker Sync - Worldwide Replication & OffLine Sync - Jesse Barnum - Day 1
If you need to have off-line access to your FileMaker customer solution; OR you want to setup multiple servers to support your worldwide FileMaker Team, you need Server Replication.
If you need to have off-line access to your FileMaker customer solution; OR you want to setup multiple servers to support your worldwide FileMaker Team, you need Server Replication.
Day 1 - We’re covering the basics, including having the Amazon servers already setup.
Day 1 - We’re covering the basics, including having the Amazon servers already setup.
Daily Open Q&A with FileMaker Experts. Questions about Installation, Upgrading, Purchasing or How to make FileMaker work for you in your company to increase ROI.
Daily Open Q&A with FileMaker Experts. Questions about Installation, Upgrading, Purchasing or How to make FileMaker work for you in your company to increase ROI.
Transcript
Transcript
FileMaker Sync - Worldwide Replication & OffLine Sync - Jesse Barnum - Day 1
FileMaker Sync - Worldwide Replication & OffLine Sync - Jesse Barnum - Day 1
Hello everyone! Welcome to an awesome Monday, my Name is Richard Carlton. I'm the creator of FMtraining.tv where we create great FileMaker training on demand training courses for the FileMaker platform. We also do daily livestreams Monday through Friday at this time slot happens to be one o'clock for me but for everyone else around the world, welcome! I really appreciate that you're here. Today is day one of some really exciting stuff, remember I have a rule I never want to be the smartest guy in the room because that's a real bad right? So today I have many people much smarter than I am. They are here to help us out so we're going to be talking about FileMaker in the enterprise specifically and synchronization. It's not just the enterprise but really syncing between two copies of FileMaker and it's kind of applicable in the enterprise a little bit. Claris for 30 years has really never positioned itself as an enterprise product or platform. And what's happened recently is that, we don't hear marketing talking to us so much as we don't hear that Claris saying hey we're enterprise now what ends up happening is that, uh when uh the CEO at Claris talks uh to folks especially in the media he starts using these words like enterprise software.
Hello everyone! Welcome to an awesome Monday, my Name is Richard Carlton. I'm the creator of FMtraining.tv where we create great FileMaker training on demand training courses for the FileMaker platform. We also do daily livestreams Monday through Friday at this time slot happens to be one o'clock for me but for everyone else around the world, welcome! I really appreciate that you're here. Today is day one of some really exciting stuff, remember I have a rule I never want to be the smartest guy in the room because that's a real bad right? So today I have many people much smarter than I am. They are here to help us out so we're going to be talking about FileMaker in the enterprise specifically and synchronization. It's not just the enterprise but really syncing between two copies of FileMaker and it's kind of applicable in the enterprise a little bit. Claris for 30 years has really never positioned itself as an enterprise product or platform. And what's happened recently is that, we don't hear marketing talking to us so much as we don't hear that Claris saying hey we're enterprise now what ends up happening is that, uh when uh the CEO at Claris talks uh to folks especially in the media he starts using these words like enterprise software.
And so Claris is apparently attempting to reposition itself as an enterprise product. Just keep in mind that that is something that they have not historically done and of course that brings up the question what is enterprise because most of us don't really build enterprise applications. We build applications. The biggest FileMaker solutions most of the time have two or three hundred users but what if you needed thousands of users right? Well you know simultaneous users then really you have to have more than one server. You want those people to be sharing the same data and that's really what today is all about. It's about bringing FileMaker to the enterprise or the enterprise to FileMaker whichever. And so a basic FileMaker solution by itself, you know you really need to think about designing efficiently, designing what we call Lean Design in our course curriculum. I'm going to jump over here real quick to our live training schedule but what you're going to see is if I go up under here a lot of you who are familiar, we have some new people here but a lot of you are familiar with Nick Hunter, right? And Nick Hunter has a free video course uh where we talk about uh Lean Design and so this is probably 20 hours of training here. That's just I'm pretty on the high end of learning how to make your FileMaker solutions work very very well, right? And so the Lean Design is a big part of this but you also need some great third-party companies, like 360works. Basically the plan for today is to start the conversation about sync. I'm going to be playing air traffic control a little bit with this with Jesse or helping him out a little bit.
And so Claris is apparently attempting to reposition itself as an enterprise product. Just keep in mind that that is something that they have not historically done and of course that brings up the question what is enterprise because most of us don't really build enterprise applications. We build applications. The biggest FileMaker solutions most of the time have two or three hundred users but what if you needed thousands of users right? Well you know simultaneous users then really you have to have more than one server. You want those people to be sharing the same data and that's really what today is all about. It's about bringing FileMaker to the enterprise or the enterprise to FileMaker whichever. And so a basic FileMaker solution by itself, you know you really need to think about designing efficiently, designing what we call Lean Design in our course curriculum. I'm going to jump over here real quick to our live training schedule but what you're going to see is if I go up under here a lot of you who are familiar, we have some new people here but a lot of you are familiar with Nick Hunter, right? And Nick Hunter has a free video course uh where we talk about uh Lean Design and so this is probably 20 hours of training here. That's just I'm pretty on the high end of learning how to make your FileMaker solutions work very very well, right? And so the Lean Design is a big part of this but you also need some great third-party companies, like 360works. Basically the plan for today is to start the conversation about sync. I'm going to be playing air traffic control a little bit with this with Jesse or helping him out a little bit.
So let's talk about the little news real quick. FileMaker is coming up with their engaging conference or their Devcon conference. They call it engage but no one knows what engage is so it's still kind of Devcon. Those of you who wanted a Devcon Deal we are bringing back the two basically the double bundle that we have so you can get two copies of our complete training which includes FileMaker Pro 19. It includes all the stuff that we have you can access that at FM at https but is this bitly, it's this FM double we'll make sure we put that into discord twitch and YouTube as well. This is a really great bundle you get everything for two people pretty exciting. So today's conversation, this is Jesse Barnum, this is the awesome guy that he is. He is a pretty uh neat guy he's been doing Devcon presentations for many many years. We kind of bug him periodically and present critical technology. I frequently will spend time as you folks know this, I do live streams and we will talk about 360works. We talk about Nikkor at Goya, another mission critical company. 360works has been ultra mission critical for Claris. I don't know that Claris would ever tell you this but I mean like I said 360works saved back at the time FileMaker asked back in the day was around FileMaker 85910 time frame. Digital document management never existed in FileMaker until Jesse brought it to the platform. And so you know once again, this is another situation where Claris wants to push to the enterprise but they can't really get there unless you have a really highly efficient FileMaker solution one two and you have some replication or synchronization software to synchronize the server. So we'll get into that conversation just briefly.
So let's talk about the little news real quick. FileMaker is coming up with their engaging conference or their Devcon conference. They call it engage but no one knows what engage is so it's still kind of Devcon. Those of you who wanted a Devcon Deal we are bringing back the two basically the double bundle that we have so you can get two copies of our complete training which includes FileMaker Pro 19. It includes all the stuff that we have you can access that at FM at https but is this bitly, it's this FM double we'll make sure we put that into discord twitch and YouTube as well. This is a really great bundle you get everything for two people pretty exciting. So today's conversation, this is Jesse Barnum, this is the awesome guy that he is. He is a pretty uh neat guy he's been doing Devcon presentations for many many years. We kind of bug him periodically and present critical technology. I frequently will spend time as you folks know this, I do live streams and we will talk about 360works. We talk about Nikkor at Goya, another mission critical company. 360works has been ultra mission critical for Claris. I don't know that Claris would ever tell you this but I mean like I said 360works saved back at the time FileMaker asked back in the day was around FileMaker 85910 time frame. Digital document management never existed in FileMaker until Jesse brought it to the platform. And so you know once again, this is another situation where Claris wants to push to the enterprise but they can't really get there unless you have a really highly efficient FileMaker solution one two and you have some replication or synchronization software to synchronize the server. So we'll get into that conversation just briefly.
I also want to point out the fact that we were trying to decide what artwork we were going to use with Jesse, since he is now in the enterprise and I told him to make sure that he has a for pips because he is a captain. So we are going to be doing live streaming once again with Jesse for the next four days. This is all on the same topic. Jesse has a propensity to just run through this at 500 miles an hour. He practices doing this presentation at speed. The problem today is more of a conversation to bring everyone up to date with everyone who's not a certified ninja FileMaker developer. If I show you our diagram right here uh we're gonna try to include everyone if you're Bunny right Bunny are you there? Maverick de goose bunny, are you there come in. I don't see bunny uh so bunny may not be here yet but we have brand new developers one of which is Bunny. He is in the Netherlands, I think. Is that where you're at? But intermediate developers have seen your ninjas Jesse. If you had to rank Jesse's skill set he's over here breaking off the side of the paper over here right so he tends to talk like we're all over here. But I have to slow him down and with this for the entire audience. So what I want to do is make sure that everyone here asks questions, questions feel free to slow us down if we're going too fast. Now I want to see if Jesse is there, he's unmuted. Are you there Jesse Barnum? Everyone, this is Jesse, he's the CEO of 360works. Really awesome guy, very talented individual. He's talented in Amazon and building products like I'm talented and putting training together in FileMaker. So, we together make a very dangerous team. In fact this is the guy, when we watch the rolling credits is hiking the fifty thousand dollars to me, right? In the football we're playing, fifty thousand dollars it's actually fifty thousand dollar football stack up.
I also want to point out the fact that we were trying to decide what artwork we were going to use with Jesse, since he is now in the enterprise and I told him to make sure that he has a for pips because he is a captain. So we are going to be doing live streaming once again with Jesse for the next four days. This is all on the same topic. Jesse has a propensity to just run through this at 500 miles an hour. He practices doing this presentation at speed. The problem today is more of a conversation to bring everyone up to date with everyone who's not a certified ninja FileMaker developer. If I show you our diagram right here uh we're gonna try to include everyone if you're Bunny right Bunny are you there? Maverick de goose bunny, are you there come in. I don't see bunny uh so bunny may not be here yet but we have brand new developers one of which is Bunny. He is in the Netherlands, I think. Is that where you're at? But intermediate developers have seen your ninjas Jesse. If you had to rank Jesse's skill set he's over here breaking off the side of the paper over here right so he tends to talk like we're all over here. But I have to slow him down and with this for the entire audience. So what I want to do is make sure that everyone here asks questions, questions feel free to slow us down if we're going too fast. Now I want to see if Jesse is there, he's unmuted. Are you there Jesse Barnum? Everyone, this is Jesse, he's the CEO of 360works. Really awesome guy, very talented individual. He's talented in Amazon and building products like I'm talented and putting training together in FileMaker. So, we together make a very dangerous team. In fact this is the guy, when we watch the rolling credits is hiking the fifty thousand dollars to me, right? In the football we're playing, fifty thousand dollars it's actually fifty thousand dollar football stack up.
There was a better story that happened downtown. What was that? That was, remember the guy walking around with his xylophone trying to get every clear out of the vendor area and you got him in the headlock? Yeah oh yeah! okay yeah am I, am I allowed to mention that? Uh! Well yeah! That was the year before, so they yeah, I'm kind of a marginally aggressive individual so yeah I told them so they have this poor hotel, okay so one story. So, so they're, so what they're doing is that they're at Devcon if they ever do a Devcon again which is a really interesting question if we're taking bets on whether that ever happens again. But if it does, I hope it's in Nashville. Yeah! Being really nice and so, they though they have like everyone's having lunch and then they walk through the guy with like some poor hotel employee gives us this like xylophone chimes with the ding dong thing on our cup or whatever and he's walking through going ding ding ding ding ding ding and that's your like subtle clue that you should head for a session. And quit talking to your friends about FileMaker and go watch a session on FileMaker any and I'm trying to like talk to people and sell product or talk about Jesse or I'm doing a live broadcast I remember what it was and and he's going and I told him I said you keep doing that I'm gonna you up right? And he came right by doing it again. I went over and grabbed and put him in a headlock and I guess he dropped the dinger. I don't remember what happened. I kind of fuzzed that out of my mind but everybody was smiling. You were smiling I just couldn't tell if he was like a smile of fear or a smile of like he's in on the joke I couldn't quite tell you.
There was a better story that happened downtown. What was that? That was, remember the guy walking around with his xylophone trying to get every clear out of the vendor area and you got him in the headlock? Yeah oh yeah! okay yeah am I, am I allowed to mention that? Uh! Well yeah! That was the year before, so they yeah, I'm kind of a marginally aggressive individual so yeah I told them so they have this poor hotel, okay so one story. So, so they're, so what they're doing is that they're at Devcon if they ever do a Devcon again which is a really interesting question if we're taking bets on whether that ever happens again. But if it does, I hope it's in Nashville. Yeah! Being really nice and so, they though they have like everyone's having lunch and then they walk through the guy with like some poor hotel employee gives us this like xylophone chimes with the ding dong thing on our cup or whatever and he's walking through going ding ding ding ding ding ding and that's your like subtle clue that you should head for a session. And quit talking to your friends about FileMaker and go watch a session on FileMaker any and I'm trying to like talk to people and sell product or talk about Jesse or I'm doing a live broadcast I remember what it was and and he's going and I told him I said you keep doing that I'm gonna you up right? And he came right by doing it again. I went over and grabbed and put him in a headlock and I guess he dropped the dinger. I don't remember what happened. I kind of fuzzed that out of my mind but everybody was smiling. You were smiling I just couldn't tell if he was like a smile of fear or a smile of like he's in on the joke I couldn't quite tell you.
Yeah! Let's get on with this thing so Chris is so Christian I keep calling you Christian because we got Christian Olsen. He's floating around here too, somewhere. Talk about the enterprise, what is the enterprise to you Jesse and what is this mirror-sync product you want to walk us through that a little bit verbally. Yeah, so you know I mean an enterprise is a company where you know typically large companies they're very risk-averse uh you get to be a certain size and your priorities change. And rather than focusing necessarily on being like a nimblest and the fastest you're focused more on being the most reliable and uh and scalability. And Richard, you brought up the points you know about enterprise and scalability I think what you were talking about uh like an introduction.
Yeah! Let's get on with this thing so Chris is so Christian I keep calling you Christian because we got Christian Olsen. He's floating around here too, somewhere. Talk about the enterprise, what is the enterprise to you Jesse and what is this mirror-sync product you want to walk us through that a little bit verbally. Yeah, so you know I mean an enterprise is a company where you know typically large companies they're very risk-averse uh you get to be a certain size and your priorities change. And rather than focusing necessarily on being like a nimblest and the fastest you're focused more on being the most reliable and uh and scalability. And Richard, you brought up the points you know about enterprise and scalability I think what you were talking about uh like an introduction.
Yeah! And it made me think about something that I hadn't planned on mentioning but it really kind of draws a point of mind is that I think a lot of people in small businesses may not understand what scalability means. They hear that scalability means fast. You know if a customer says I want something that's scalable I think a lot of us are used to thinking oh well they wanted to be fast. And those two terms don't mean the same thing and we'll get into this more you know as we talk about some of the things that nursing can do. But scale so let's say that you have two systems and System A takes uh five seconds to run a particular operation. System B takes one second to run that same operation. Well you could accurately say that System B is faster than System A. A takes five seconds B takes one second. So B wins on speed. Now let's talk about scalability, let's say that you now have a thousand users accessing those same servers. And uh System A uh still takes five seconds each time a user does it when there's a thousand users doing it at the same time. System B each user who clicks it takes a thousand seconds to get that thing done. System B is faster than a but it is definitely not more scalable than A. And so uh so scalability is basically the question of how adversely affected does your speed become as you increase the number of users. And that's where you really get into the enterprise. It's not so much about, does this button take half a second or three quarters of a second it's more like if I've got 500 people all clicking this button at the same time what happens? Yeah that is a really great explanation. I mean I can't do any better so, the idea is that it's and we talk about this with FileMaker the I the idea with scalability we talk about this and I just want to frame this and then we'll go forward is that when you're brand new to the FileMaker platform you're happy to get it to work at all. That make sense? You're happy to get FileMaker to work at all. And then as you start to roll it out with a team of people on a FileMaker server the cloud five people it's great 10 people's great there's a magical number in there where the performance starts to drag. Because you haven't thought about performance at all.
Yeah! And it made me think about something that I hadn't planned on mentioning but it really kind of draws a point of mind is that I think a lot of people in small businesses may not understand what scalability means. They hear that scalability means fast. You know if a customer says I want something that's scalable I think a lot of us are used to thinking oh well they wanted to be fast. And those two terms don't mean the same thing and we'll get into this more you know as we talk about some of the things that nursing can do. But scale so let's say that you have two systems and System A takes uh five seconds to run a particular operation. System B takes one second to run that same operation. Well you could accurately say that System B is faster than System A. A takes five seconds B takes one second. So B wins on speed. Now let's talk about scalability, let's say that you now have a thousand users accessing those same servers. And uh System A uh still takes five seconds each time a user does it when there's a thousand users doing it at the same time. System B each user who clicks it takes a thousand seconds to get that thing done. System B is faster than a but it is definitely not more scalable than A. And so uh so scalability is basically the question of how adversely affected does your speed become as you increase the number of users. And that's where you really get into the enterprise. It's not so much about, does this button take half a second or three quarters of a second it's more like if I've got 500 people all clicking this button at the same time what happens? Yeah that is a really great explanation. I mean I can't do any better so, the idea is that it's and we talk about this with FileMaker the I the idea with scalability we talk about this and I just want to frame this and then we'll go forward is that when you're brand new to the FileMaker platform you're happy to get it to work at all. That make sense? You're happy to get FileMaker to work at all. And then as you start to roll it out with a team of people on a FileMaker server the cloud five people it's great 10 people's great there's a magical number in there where the performance starts to drag. Because you haven't thought about performance at all.
And so it typically happens somewhere between 20 and 30 people, maybe a little higher than 30 but well the performance will go off a cliff and that is where it's not scalable so we're trying to help you kind of grow your user base to 50 or 100 or 200 people. Last year we took the FM starting point, which is this free CRM. We talk about the free CRM all the time. I'm gonna hit the button for the uh starting point right here so this is the free starting point for an updated version. This has been tested on a single pretty decently sized Amazon server at 200 to 300 people. It was 261 and then we did some things to try to break it and so one FileMaker server can do all that right. Does that make sense? But what if we have a thousand people or we have people around the world, well today's conversation we're going to kind of kick this over and get this going. So we're going to jump over to Jesse uh hang on one second I'm jumping to you Jesse there we are, okay? Uh yeah, all right so go ahead Jesse. So uh his arm slides up right now? Yeah! You're a lot you're yeah clear absolutely! All right, cool! Um okay so, I want to talk about the product that we make called mirror-sync and before I really dive into these bullet points here, I just want to give a really kind of just very broad overview.
And so it typically happens somewhere between 20 and 30 people, maybe a little higher than 30 but well the performance will go off a cliff and that is where it's not scalable so we're trying to help you kind of grow your user base to 50 or 100 or 200 people. Last year we took the FM starting point, which is this free CRM. We talk about the free CRM all the time. I'm gonna hit the button for the uh starting point right here so this is the free starting point for an updated version. This has been tested on a single pretty decently sized Amazon server at 200 to 300 people. It was 261 and then we did some things to try to break it and so one FileMaker server can do all that right. Does that make sense? But what if we have a thousand people or we have people around the world, well today's conversation we're going to kind of kick this over and get this going. So we're going to jump over to Jesse uh hang on one second I'm jumping to you Jesse there we are, okay? Uh yeah, all right so go ahead Jesse. So uh his arm slides up right now? Yeah! You're a lot you're yeah clear absolutely! All right, cool! Um okay so, I want to talk about the product that we make called mirror-sync and before I really dive into these bullet points here, I just want to give a really kind of just very broad overview.
I'm sure people on this call I know some of you by name and I know some of you are using nursing heavily, so I know you guys already know this uh but I'm not sure everybody on the call understands you know what sync is or or what mirror sync is or why you would care or why you would use it. So our most common reason that people buy mirror sync is because they want to be able to take FileMaker on either their phone or their iPad, and go places that either they have no connection or they have a slow connection or they have an inconsistent connection. And you know all three of those are kind of different. One of our biggest nursing customers is they use it for emergency medical staff, paramedics, firefighters that kind of stuff. And uh so, they might have a really good signal in the back of their ambulance as they're driving in one area but as they start to key data in about the guy that they're rushing the hospital, they drop the connection between you know cell towers. And so if it was if it was a normal situation where there were guests to FileMaker server, that would kick them out of whatever they were doing they would have to re-log back in, reload all of the schema and scripts and layouts and things like that and then try to find where they were and pick back up and hopefully not lose the connection again.
I'm sure people on this call I know some of you by name and I know some of you are using nursing heavily, so I know you guys already know this uh but I'm not sure everybody on the call understands you know what sync is or or what mirror sync is or why you would care or why you would use it. So our most common reason that people buy mirror sync is because they want to be able to take FileMaker on either their phone or their iPad, and go places that either they have no connection or they have a slow connection or they have an inconsistent connection. And you know all three of those are kind of different. One of our biggest nursing customers is they use it for emergency medical staff, paramedics, firefighters that kind of stuff. And uh so, they might have a really good signal in the back of their ambulance as they're driving in one area but as they start to key data in about the guy that they're rushing the hospital, they drop the connection between you know cell towers. And so if it was if it was a normal situation where there were guests to FileMaker server, that would kick them out of whatever they were doing they would have to re-log back in, reload all of the schema and scripts and layouts and things like that and then try to find where they were and pick back up and hopefully not lose the connection again.
So clearly in that case you need the ability when you're riding in the back of an ambulance on the way to the hospital you need a way to enter data that is not going to get interrupted if your cell connection drops. If you are doing, you know I didn't even really realize how big this industry was until people started buying mirror sync but oil pipelines, uh there's field inspections of uh like oil rigs, pipelines, water lines, gas lines and things like that. And they're out in the middle of nowhere uh and so obviously they're not going to have any internet connection but they still want to be able to use FileMaker to take pictures to take readings enter measurements that kind of stuff ensure compliance, a really funny one is one of our customers uses uh mirror-sync and FileMaker for cellphone tower construction. And so by definition, wherever they are there is no sell signal, otherwise they wouldn't be building a cell tower there, um so they need to do land surveys uh that kind of stuff and they want to use FileMaker to do it.
So clearly in that case you need the ability when you're riding in the back of an ambulance on the way to the hospital you need a way to enter data that is not going to get interrupted if your cell connection drops. If you are doing, you know I didn't even really realize how big this industry was until people started buying mirror sync but oil pipelines, uh there's field inspections of uh like oil rigs, pipelines, water lines, gas lines and things like that. And they're out in the middle of nowhere uh and so obviously they're not going to have any internet connection but they still want to be able to use FileMaker to take pictures to take readings enter measurements that kind of stuff ensure compliance, a really funny one is one of our customers uses uh mirror-sync and FileMaker for cellphone tower construction. And so by definition, wherever they are there is no sell signal, otherwise they wouldn't be building a cell tower there, um so they need to do land surveys uh that kind of stuff and they want to use FileMaker to do it.
So mirror sync is a really good choice for those kinds of things. Even if you are not out in the wild or in a remote place or driving at 70 miles an hour in traffic, it's often still annoying to connect to a FileMaker server as a guest. It's just slow in many cases, uh you know it's a you're often limited by the amount of bandwidth available to you on either your cell connection or your wi-fi connection so another uh case where people are using nursing first stuff is rental car check-ins. Um, some of you know some FileMaker developers that I'm friends with who built a vertical market app so that uh you know when someone returns a rental car they have a FileMaker go application that they use to scan the odometer and that kind of stuff. Now they could put in wi-fi hotspots and it would probably work but they don't want to. They don't want to worry about that potential point of failure. They don't want to worry about all of a sudden a dozen people not being able to do their jobs if the wi-fi gets disrupted for some reason. So if you're able to work on your own copy of the database that is loaded on your iPad or your phone, then you know it's going to be fast, you know that nothing is going to interrupt it and you know you can go anywhere with it. So that's the kind of core mission of mirror sync.
So mirror sync is a really good choice for those kinds of things. Even if you are not out in the wild or in a remote place or driving at 70 miles an hour in traffic, it's often still annoying to connect to a FileMaker server as a guest. It's just slow in many cases, uh you know it's a you're often limited by the amount of bandwidth available to you on either your cell connection or your wi-fi connection so another uh case where people are using nursing first stuff is rental car check-ins. Um, some of you know some FileMaker developers that I'm friends with who built a vertical market app so that uh you know when someone returns a rental car they have a FileMaker go application that they use to scan the odometer and that kind of stuff. Now they could put in wi-fi hotspots and it would probably work but they don't want to. They don't want to worry about that potential point of failure. They don't want to worry about all of a sudden a dozen people not being able to do their jobs if the wi-fi gets disrupted for some reason. So if you're able to work on your own copy of the database that is loaded on your iPad or your phone, then you know it's going to be fast, you know that nothing is going to interrupt it and you know you can go anywhere with it. So that's the kind of core mission of mirror sync.
Joe Martin's answer to some questions, Scott asked, does my mirror-sync work between server versions say between like an 18 server and a 19 server can you sync between the two? Uh, Yeah! Mirror-sync 6 which is our newest and best version supports FileMaker server 17 and later. Okay! So you can sync between anything in that range you could sync between 17 18 17 19 18 and 19 whatever you want. It also does support FileMaker Cloud, the new FileMaker cloud too. But, uh there are some, there's a really awful terrible bug that I've reported to FileMaker that I keep following up with. The data API simply doesn't work. There's really not a really great easy way with a trusted third party where you can actually use the data API really really well at least that's like if you're going to make a page there with it. You have to use some um some questionable libraries with question questionable lineage to make that work and so uh pending the current time if you need a PHP slash gateway data API like when I when I press this button here to show you the upcoming live schedule, this is basically the FileMaker data API these are records vertical these are records in a FileMaker solution cloud cloud 2 just for the moment doesn't do this like it needs to and and so we're basically for the most part if you're doing any sort of creative syncing of any of this stuff you need to use FileMaker server. And most people do that with Amazon, with an EC2 instance on Windows right or something along those lines. And actually let me jump in for one second to point out everybody in this call can actually help with this. If you would like to try and help with this go on to the FileMaker community search in the bugs. And issues list I've reported a bug to them and it's called uh oh gosh I wish I remember the title exactly but basically if you for data API FileMaker Cloud Intermittent. You'll find the issue that I've outlined, look for you know Jesse Barnum and list of posters and vote for it um and if you know half of the people in this call voted it up. Yeah, it would probably get fixed. Well, we'll be back tomorrow. We'll bring the link so any hanging things we'll bring back tomorrow. Good alright cool!
Joe Martin's answer to some questions, Scott asked, does my mirror-sync work between server versions say between like an 18 server and a 19 server can you sync between the two? Uh, Yeah! Mirror-sync 6 which is our newest and best version supports FileMaker server 17 and later. Okay! So you can sync between anything in that range you could sync between 17 18 17 19 18 and 19 whatever you want. It also does support FileMaker Cloud, the new FileMaker cloud too. But, uh there are some, there's a really awful terrible bug that I've reported to FileMaker that I keep following up with. The data API simply doesn't work. There's really not a really great easy way with a trusted third party where you can actually use the data API really really well at least that's like if you're going to make a page there with it. You have to use some um some questionable libraries with question questionable lineage to make that work and so uh pending the current time if you need a PHP slash gateway data API like when I when I press this button here to show you the upcoming live schedule, this is basically the FileMaker data API these are records vertical these are records in a FileMaker solution cloud cloud 2 just for the moment doesn't do this like it needs to and and so we're basically for the most part if you're doing any sort of creative syncing of any of this stuff you need to use FileMaker server. And most people do that with Amazon, with an EC2 instance on Windows right or something along those lines. And actually let me jump in for one second to point out everybody in this call can actually help with this. If you would like to try and help with this go on to the FileMaker community search in the bugs. And issues list I've reported a bug to them and it's called uh oh gosh I wish I remember the title exactly but basically if you for data API FileMaker Cloud Intermittent. You'll find the issue that I've outlined, look for you know Jesse Barnum and list of posters and vote for it um and if you know half of the people in this call voted it up. Yeah, it would probably get fixed. Well, we'll be back tomorrow. We'll bring the link so any hanging things we'll bring back tomorrow. Good alright cool!
So uh, Jesse where are we going to go from here so, so what I just really covered was this first bullet point here, okay I was wondering because I'm typing to other people so I'm not listening to everything you're saying so you haven't gotten down here yet all right. Keep moving chief. Yep, so we just covered client to server sync that is basically client to server sync basically you got iPads, you got phones, it does also work with laptops which we don't get a lot of use for but it's actually really cool to be able to work on FileMaker on your laptop and then sync it to a server when you have wi-fi. But that's bullet point number one. Let's talk about bullet point number two bullet point number two is, you've got this big system built in FileMaker server but you need it to uh you need to also have it running in some other system. Maybe it's my sequel maybe, it's dynamo, maybe it's salesforce mirror-sync that can do all those things it can do: Oracle SQL server red Amazon redshift any JDBC compatible database. It'll support all those things. So we have another very large client of ours . They do non-emergency medical transportation and they have approximately 2 000 drivers. It's kind of like Uber for medical appointments and they have 2000 drivers that go around and pick people up and take them to the doctor's appointments and it's their specialized training and equipment and oxygen tanks and stuff like that. So it's not just quite as simple as Uber, but the point is that they had a web interface that was built in FileMaker. And if you've ever tried to build a web interface in FileMaker you know it works but not when you get 2000 people accessing it. So what they did, what we helped them do was sync that FileMaker database. They've got about 200 to 300 internal people working on FileMaker using FileMaker pro connected directly to the FileMaker server. And then these 2000 external people that have a web interface to get to you know to pick the people up at their appointments. So we helped them build the synchronization that would sync the FileMaker server database to a MySQL database and then we built the web interface to talk to MySQL and that has completely solved their problems.
So uh, Jesse where are we going to go from here so, so what I just really covered was this first bullet point here, okay I was wondering because I'm typing to other people so I'm not listening to everything you're saying so you haven't gotten down here yet all right. Keep moving chief. Yep, so we just covered client to server sync that is basically client to server sync basically you got iPads, you got phones, it does also work with laptops which we don't get a lot of use for but it's actually really cool to be able to work on FileMaker on your laptop and then sync it to a server when you have wi-fi. But that's bullet point number one. Let's talk about bullet point number two bullet point number two is, you've got this big system built in FileMaker server but you need it to uh you need to also have it running in some other system. Maybe it's my sequel maybe, it's dynamo, maybe it's salesforce mirror-sync that can do all those things it can do: Oracle SQL server red Amazon redshift any JDBC compatible database. It'll support all those things. So we have another very large client of ours . They do non-emergency medical transportation and they have approximately 2 000 drivers. It's kind of like Uber for medical appointments and they have 2000 drivers that go around and pick people up and take them to the doctor's appointments and it's their specialized training and equipment and oxygen tanks and stuff like that. So it's not just quite as simple as Uber, but the point is that they had a web interface that was built in FileMaker. And if you've ever tried to build a web interface in FileMaker you know it works but not when you get 2000 people accessing it. So what they did, what we helped them do was sync that FileMaker database. They've got about 200 to 300 internal people working on FileMaker using FileMaker pro connected directly to the FileMaker server. And then these 2000 external people that have a web interface to get to you know to pick the people up at their appointments. So we helped them build the synchronization that would sync the FileMaker server database to a MySQL database and then we built the web interface to talk to MySQL and that has completely solved their problems.
They would have half hour to an hour outages before, where servers needed to be restarted, backups needed to be reloaded. It was actually hanging FileMaker up from the volume it was called threads to deadlock and so that problem has been 100 percent solved by taking that load off of the poor FileMaker server which is really not designed from the ground up to support 2000 web users. And then moving that to my sequel which is designed from the ground up for that exact kind of thing. A similar kind of situation. similar situation I'll keep it short because it's not that different but we did a system for a large public school system and we had to have 60 000 people log into their database simultaneously and when I say simultaneously I mean like at five o'clock PM in zero seconds on Friday because everybody wanted to check and see which programs their kids had gotten accepted into and that is the time they posted those results.
They would have half hour to an hour outages before, where servers needed to be restarted, backups needed to be reloaded. It was actually hanging FileMaker up from the volume it was called threads to deadlock and so that problem has been 100 percent solved by taking that load off of the poor FileMaker server which is really not designed from the ground up to support 2000 web users. And then moving that to my sequel which is designed from the ground up for that exact kind of thing. A similar kind of situation. similar situation I'll keep it short because it's not that different but we did a system for a large public school system and we had to have 60 000 people log into their database simultaneously and when I say simultaneously I mean like at five o'clock PM in zero seconds on Friday because everybody wanted to check and see which programs their kids had gotten accepted into and that is the time they posted those results.
So basically within like a 15-minute block of time, you had 30 to 60 000 people all trying to hit the website at the same time to check the site and see what programs their kids got accepted to. And we knew that was going to kill FileMaker. We actually knew that's going to kill my sequel too because another company had done it in my sequel the year before, and that had melted down actually three years running and had not been able to handle it. So we did it with dynamodb which runs Amazon.com and that's it's not even like breathing hard to handle that kind of load and we use mirror-sync to sync this FileMaker database to the Dynamo database and and they actually did a load test on it with 40 000 simultaneous people and they said going back to my point about scalability, they said that the web application ran the exact same speed with one simultaneous user and 40 000 simultaneous users. So that's just kind of it's, it's making all of this power and the scalability mirror-sync is putting that within the reach of all of us and the FileMaker community. We don't necessarily need to switch to a new tool, we just need to extend our existing tool with mirror sync to use these other capabilities. Absolutely! absolutely! Yep yep yep and that that would be a good another webinar someday we could talk about dynamodb because it's you know that's like unnatural things you do with the database it's really I'd love to dynamo is crazy.
So basically within like a 15-minute block of time, you had 30 to 60 000 people all trying to hit the website at the same time to check the site and see what programs their kids got accepted to. And we knew that was going to kill FileMaker. We actually knew that's going to kill my sequel too because another company had done it in my sequel the year before, and that had melted down actually three years running and had not been able to handle it. So we did it with dynamodb which runs Amazon.com and that's it's not even like breathing hard to handle that kind of load and we use mirror-sync to sync this FileMaker database to the Dynamo database and and they actually did a load test on it with 40 000 simultaneous people and they said going back to my point about scalability, they said that the web application ran the exact same speed with one simultaneous user and 40 000 simultaneous users. So that's just kind of it's, it's making all of this power and the scalability mirror-sync is putting that within the reach of all of us and the FileMaker community. We don't necessarily need to switch to a new tool, we just need to extend our existing tool with mirror sync to use these other capabilities. Absolutely! absolutely! Yep yep yep and that that would be a good another webinar someday we could talk about dynamodb because it's you know that's like unnatural things you do with the database it's really I'd love to dynamo is crazy.
I was reading that on prime day three years ago and I'm sure it's more now three years ago on prime day they measured dynamodb as sustained just for Amazon.com traffic they measured a sustained 13. 9 million requests per second. 13. 9 million requests per second on Amazon.com from people shopping and dynamo handled that so whatever purposes we can think of dynamo is going to handle it. Right, the trick is though that when you have to when you go into that conversation everything you think you know about databases like oh it's a relationship and it's a key yeah you have to like okay just check all that at the door because we're starting from scratch. It's like reimagining it and of course it has it. FileMaker does things it won't do, right? But yeah so it's the right tool for the right job and and any more about FileMaker about integrating with the correct third-party tool. And then of course we get to kind of our last bullet point here which is the whole thing about multiple FileMaker servers which you can use them two different ways. You can put them all together so they're clustering kind of backed up ready to go or you can spread them around the world or do both, right? Yeah, yeah! And that's going to be the focus of this kind of four day thing is this third bullet point here.
I was reading that on prime day three years ago and I'm sure it's more now three years ago on prime day they measured dynamodb as sustained just for Amazon.com traffic they measured a sustained 13. 9 million requests per second. 13. 9 million requests per second on Amazon.com from people shopping and dynamo handled that so whatever purposes we can think of dynamo is going to handle it. Right, the trick is though that when you have to when you go into that conversation everything you think you know about databases like oh it's a relationship and it's a key yeah you have to like okay just check all that at the door because we're starting from scratch. It's like reimagining it and of course it has it. FileMaker does things it won't do, right? But yeah so it's the right tool for the right job and and any more about FileMaker about integrating with the correct third-party tool. And then of course we get to kind of our last bullet point here which is the whole thing about multiple FileMaker servers which you can use them two different ways. You can put them all together so they're clustering kind of backed up ready to go or you can spread them around the world or do both, right? Yeah, yeah! And that's going to be the focus of this kind of four day thing is this third bullet point here.
We might talk about the first one, I'll leave that up to Richard if he wants to talk more or do a demo or something like that but I think the heart of this is going to be this third bullet point. So I've got a couple. I've got just a few slides here to kind of graphically show what I'm talking about. Okay, so the first one is clustering. Clustering means, so the green box in this diagram is a particular Amazon region and I'm going to talk more about everything that mirror-sync can do with or without Amazon. But I'm going to be talking about Amazon throughout this because Amazon has a lot of tools that just are out of the box to do these things. You could do this on your own server on your own data center in your own office you could do it on azure, you could do with google you could do with any service provider you want I'm most familiar with Amazon and so I'll use Amazon terminology as I'm going throughout this to talk about this.
We might talk about the first one, I'll leave that up to Richard if he wants to talk more or do a demo or something like that but I think the heart of this is going to be this third bullet point. So I've got a couple. I've got just a few slides here to kind of graphically show what I'm talking about. Okay, so the first one is clustering. Clustering means, so the green box in this diagram is a particular Amazon region and I'm going to talk more about everything that mirror-sync can do with or without Amazon. But I'm going to be talking about Amazon throughout this because Amazon has a lot of tools that just are out of the box to do these things. You could do this on your own server on your own data center in your own office you could do it on azure, you could do with google you could do with any service provider you want I'm most familiar with Amazon and so I'll use Amazon terminology as I'm going throughout this to talk about this.
But the green box here represents a single Amazon Region. It could be you know the Northern California Region, could be the Eastern uh the Northern Virginia Region which is close to me. You know Sweden. Let me interrupt, so let me talk about this in the last week or two but basically a region is basically like a town or a small area and what Amazon does is they set up different data centers in different buildings around that town for example, right? That make sense? Yeah, they've got 22 around the world. Yeah, they've got 20 regions around the world and within and within each region are multiple buildings with multiple data centers where that data is sinking and replicating on their own throughout that. Well yeah, so the idea is that if uh one of the buildings gets hit by an asteroid or something like that or burns to the ground really you you have that they provide their own level of redundancy, right? So yeah, they call it an availability zone so you know for instance their Ohio Region that the region is Ohio and it's kind of designed to serve the Northeast United States. And then they'll have three availability zones which are three separate data centers that are kind of like triangularly in this kind of north southwest and southeast suburbs, of uh I think it's Cleveland. I don't remember the exact city. But but yeah, they'll have an availability zones all have direct pipes to each other so they have you know under a millisecond ping times between those availability zones and it's probably a good idea so the green bar the green box I have here to be clear does not represent an availability zone it represents a region .
But the green box here represents a single Amazon Region. It could be you know the Northern California Region, could be the Eastern uh the Northern Virginia Region which is close to me. You know Sweden. Let me interrupt, so let me talk about this in the last week or two but basically a region is basically like a town or a small area and what Amazon does is they set up different data centers in different buildings around that town for example, right? That make sense? Yeah, they've got 22 around the world. Yeah, they've got 20 regions around the world and within and within each region are multiple buildings with multiple data centers where that data is sinking and replicating on their own throughout that. Well yeah, so the idea is that if uh one of the buildings gets hit by an asteroid or something like that or burns to the ground really you you have that they provide their own level of redundancy, right? So yeah, they call it an availability zone so you know for instance their Ohio Region that the region is Ohio and it's kind of designed to serve the Northeast United States. And then they'll have three availability zones which are three separate data centers that are kind of like triangularly in this kind of north southwest and southeast suburbs, of uh I think it's Cleveland. I don't remember the exact city. But but yeah, they'll have an availability zones all have direct pipes to each other so they have you know under a millisecond ping times between those availability zones and it's probably a good idea so the green bar the green box I have here to be clear does not represent an availability zone it represents a region .
So this would be the Ohio Region or the northern California Region and then your servers could be in the same availability zone or better yet different availability zones so like Richard said, if a backhoe like destroys their internet connection and it actually that's not realistic because they have multiple but if something if a fire destroyed their availability zone, they would still be your other server running in the other data center on the other side of town. But so the clustering concept, the goal of clustering is to simply increase scalability and reliability. Remember, scalability is not equal speed speed is not going to be affected by clustering but scalability will be. So if you have two FileMaker servers that are syncing with each other and they're sharing data with each other, and then you have a bunch of users connecting to those servers. If you split it so that those users are now half of them are going onto one server and half of them are going on to the other server, now you've put instead of 300 users on Server A you've got 100 you've got 150 on A and 150 on B. So you're decreasing the amount of load on each server which is increasing your scalability it's also increasing your reliability because if server A goes down or server B goes down the load balancer was that orange box in the middle, will shut shuttle all the traffic over to one. The load balancer is the part that knows which of those servers are up and running.
So this would be the Ohio Region or the northern California Region and then your servers could be in the same availability zone or better yet different availability zones so like Richard said, if a backhoe like destroys their internet connection and it actually that's not realistic because they have multiple but if something if a fire destroyed their availability zone, they would still be your other server running in the other data center on the other side of town. But so the clustering concept, the goal of clustering is to simply increase scalability and reliability. Remember, scalability is not equal speed speed is not going to be affected by clustering but scalability will be. So if you have two FileMaker servers that are syncing with each other and they're sharing data with each other, and then you have a bunch of users connecting to those servers. If you split it so that those users are now half of them are going onto one server and half of them are going on to the other server, now you've put instead of 300 users on Server A you've got 100 you've got 150 on A and 150 on B. So you're decreasing the amount of load on each server which is increasing your scalability it's also increasing your reliability because if server A goes down or server B goes down the load balancer was that orange box in the middle, will shut shuttle all the traffic over to one. The load balancer is the part that knows which of those servers are up and running.
So the users don't connect to FileMaker Server A and they don't connect the FileMaker Server B. They connect to just FileMaker server which is configured in the DNS settings to point to the load balancer. The load balancer looks feels and sounds quacks just like FileMaker server, but it's actually passing all the traffic through some of it to Server A and some of it to Server B and it makes sure that if a user was connected to a then all of that user's traffic always goes to A and if a different user was connected to B, all of their traffic always goes to server b. So the user can't really tell that there are multiple FileMaker servers. There's not two different host names or two different addresses for them to connect to they just, it looks to them like it's they can't tell the difference between whether they're connecting to a FileMaker server or to a load balancer that's kind of secretly splitting that traffic to two or three or eight or however many servers you want to set up. And then you've got mirror sync which is you know the black arrow between those two servers, making sure that they stay in sync so that you know if one user adds a record to Server A, within a few seconds it'll also appear on Server B so that the other half of the users who are connected to Server B will see that new record.
So the users don't connect to FileMaker Server A and they don't connect the FileMaker Server B. They connect to just FileMaker server which is configured in the DNS settings to point to the load balancer. The load balancer looks feels and sounds quacks just like FileMaker server, but it's actually passing all the traffic through some of it to Server A and some of it to Server B and it makes sure that if a user was connected to a then all of that user's traffic always goes to A and if a different user was connected to B, all of their traffic always goes to server b. So the user can't really tell that there are multiple FileMaker servers. There's not two different host names or two different addresses for them to connect to they just, it looks to them like it's they can't tell the difference between whether they're connecting to a FileMaker server or to a load balancer that's kind of secretly splitting that traffic to two or three or eight or however many servers you want to set up. And then you've got mirror sync which is you know the black arrow between those two servers, making sure that they stay in sync so that you know if one user adds a record to Server A, within a few seconds it'll also appear on Server B so that the other half of the users who are connected to Server B will see that new record.
So it's an inexpensive fairly simple setup to do. The load balancer costs like 15 dollars a month from Amazon. The FileMaker server I'm going to jump ahead in my slides for one second and show you this. Look at my highlighted text here, this is copied and pasted directly from the license text in FileMaker. Each FileMaker user licensing contract includes three licenses of FileMaker server. So you're not having to pay for additional FileMaker server licenses to do any of the configurations. I'm going to be showing you that today. Okay, so from a cost standpoint your costs are 15 an hour for the load balancer plus one extra piece of hardware, plus a license for embarrassing.
So it's an inexpensive fairly simple setup to do. The load balancer costs like 15 dollars a month from Amazon. The FileMaker server I'm going to jump ahead in my slides for one second and show you this. Look at my highlighted text here, this is copied and pasted directly from the license text in FileMaker. Each FileMaker user licensing contract includes three licenses of FileMaker server. So you're not having to pay for additional FileMaker server licenses to do any of the configurations. I'm going to be showing you that today. Okay, so from a cost standpoint your costs are 15 an hour for the load balancer plus one extra piece of hardware, plus a license for embarrassing.
Okay, so I'm going to just jump in here because we do have comments coming in so once again. Welcome to Stephen Dolinsky! I think here, Lexi just said this for what it's worth the last part of your third bullet is my current use case scenario clients using third-party hosting based in California. We are now adding a server with the same provider in Hong Kong for Asia's client users because access for them across the US from Hong Kong is unreliable and unacceptably slow. That's the whole point of this enterprise conversation right so Alexi heard Lexie could give this presentation. I know how she is, she knows all this already. But the short version we're going to show how easy this is and the tools that we use to make this work. So for those of you wondering what we are going to be showing I got to see the auto load balancer earlier and it just made me all hot and I was excited I was really hot and bothered it was like this is very nice. So you'll get to get but over the next but one you know we can't cram it into one hour so we'll go for another 20 minutes or so once again this is going to be recorded we will you know clean it up a little bit as we go but yeah so what's next Jesse?
Okay, so I'm going to just jump in here because we do have comments coming in so once again. Welcome to Stephen Dolinsky! I think here, Lexi just said this for what it's worth the last part of your third bullet is my current use case scenario clients using third-party hosting based in California. We are now adding a server with the same provider in Hong Kong for Asia's client users because access for them across the US from Hong Kong is unreliable and unacceptably slow. That's the whole point of this enterprise conversation right so Alexi heard Lexie could give this presentation. I know how she is, she knows all this already. But the short version we're going to show how easy this is and the tools that we use to make this work. So for those of you wondering what we are going to be showing I got to see the auto load balancer earlier and it just made me all hot and I was excited I was really hot and bothered it was like this is very nice. So you'll get to get but over the next but one you know we can't cram it into one hour so we'll go for another 20 minutes or so once again this is going to be recorded we will you know clean it up a little bit as we go but yeah so what's next Jesse?
So the next, so that's clustering, let's talk about warm backups form. Backups are not super sexy but they're very easy to set up and they can be invaluable. So a warm backup notice I'm going to jump back to the previous slide. Notice my arrow in the clustering sync is double ended; it's a bi-directional sync. Everything you write to Server A gets written to Server B everything you write to Server B gets written to Server A. Server A and B always match and you can write to both. The warm backup scenario is very similar but you remove the load balancer and you make the sync one way. Everybody connects to FileMaker server one and then mirror-sync is just running in the background making sure that there is an extra server that nobody connects to that exactly matches server one.
So the next, so that's clustering, let's talk about warm backups form. Backups are not super sexy but they're very easy to set up and they can be invaluable. So a warm backup notice I'm going to jump back to the previous slide. Notice my arrow in the clustering sync is double ended; it's a bi-directional sync. Everything you write to Server A gets written to Server B everything you write to Server B gets written to Server A. Server A and B always match and you can write to both. The warm backup scenario is very similar but you remove the load balancer and you make the sync one way. Everybody connects to FileMaker server one and then mirror-sync is just running in the background making sure that there is an extra server that nobody connects to that exactly matches server one.
The benefits of this are pretty obvious if server one goes down if anything happens to it instead of hours to try to figure out what was going on and recover it and recover backups and maybe get off-site backups or whatever you just simply switch your DNS server or your router or whatever your elastic IP address to Server B and now all the stuff that was on server a you know if you're running your sync every 30 seconds then Server B is going to have everything within 0 to 30 seconds of whenever Server A went down. It's much more effective than you know FileMaker backups that you run every hour or two or ten. It's much more live there really is not much of a performance hit when that server is running when the sync is running in the background. So it allows you to basically just have an extra server that stays very up to date with your primary server.
The benefits of this are pretty obvious if server one goes down if anything happens to it instead of hours to try to figure out what was going on and recover it and recover backups and maybe get off-site backups or whatever you just simply switch your DNS server or your router or whatever your elastic IP address to Server B and now all the stuff that was on server a you know if you're running your sync every 30 seconds then Server B is going to have everything within 0 to 30 seconds of whenever Server A went down. It's much more effective than you know FileMaker backups that you run every hour or two or ten. It's much more live there really is not much of a performance hit when that server is running when the sync is running in the background. So it allows you to basically just have an extra server that stays very up to date with your primary server.
It doesn't have some of the complexities of the load balancer clustering thing that we talked about before. Okay yeah, we got a problem here major malfunction Nathan Schneider just let the secret out. Nathan Schneider says in discord I guess Jesse didn't get the very important memo that Richard's clients don't do backups. I tell you and I rail on that topic because there are people who just argue with me. I got we, we got fired by a customer because they refused to do backups and we told them that it was going to catch fire and melt to the ground. Actually Nick Hunter told him these nice people but they told him this and said it's gonna day it's gonna come with this gonna happen you're not gonna be and this is not gonna work anymore. He goes we don't like Nathan he threatened or uh Nick we don't like nick because he threatened us. I'm like he didn't threaten, he just told you what's gonna happen when he catches fire, right? So they were like offended that oh you're threatening us like uh okay never mind. It's like arguing with mother nature and physics right and you can argue with physics to a point but then you get burned to the ground, right? Physics doesn't really care if you argue with it, yeah yeah somebody doesn't mind if you agree with it or not yeah well you know I rented that once in a while.
It doesn't have some of the complexities of the load balancer clustering thing that we talked about before. Okay yeah, we got a problem here major malfunction Nathan Schneider just let the secret out. Nathan Schneider says in discord I guess Jesse didn't get the very important memo that Richard's clients don't do backups. I tell you and I rail on that topic because there are people who just argue with me. I got we, we got fired by a customer because they refused to do backups and we told them that it was going to catch fire and melt to the ground. Actually Nick Hunter told him these nice people but they told him this and said it's gonna day it's gonna come with this gonna happen you're not gonna be and this is not gonna work anymore. He goes we don't like Nathan he threatened or uh Nick we don't like nick because he threatened us. I'm like he didn't threaten, he just told you what's gonna happen when he catches fire, right? So they were like offended that oh you're threatening us like uh okay never mind. It's like arguing with mother nature and physics right and you can argue with physics to a point but then you get burned to the ground, right? Physics doesn't really care if you argue with it, yeah yeah somebody doesn't mind if you agree with it or not yeah well you know I rented that once in a while.
So yeah, so it's anyways yeah thanks Ken on these guys all right. So, okay, just so that this is this one but I mean, wouldn't you just use the other one and go back one slide when you use the previous one, because then it would like double it it would do the same thing for you right, kind of? Yeah, so the warm back up I would say in general pros and cons wise, I think there's more pros in this scenario than this scenario. Really? The advantage of well in the land clustering is that I think this land clustering gives you first of all it splits your load in half so it increases your scalability whereas the warm backup does not increase your scalability.
So yeah, so it's anyways yeah thanks Ken on these guys all right. So, okay, just so that this is this one but I mean, wouldn't you just use the other one and go back one slide when you use the previous one, because then it would like double it it would do the same thing for you right, kind of? Yeah, so the warm back up I would say in general pros and cons wise, I think there's more pros in this scenario than this scenario. Really? The advantage of well in the land clustering is that I think this land clustering gives you first of all it splits your load in half so it increases your scalability whereas the warm backup does not increase your scalability.
The clustering uh gives you kind of a live failover in case anything goes wrong whereas the warm backup usually would be something that an administrator would need to go and flip a switch to switch him over. So, I think for the most part there's advantages to the clustering that you don't have with the warm back up. Right. The advantage of the warm backup is that psychologically it's much closer to what we're used to as traditional FileMaker developers. So, you know the idea of this third-party proxy, you know magically shuttling people to different servers can be very bizarre.
The clustering uh gives you kind of a live failover in case anything goes wrong whereas the warm backup usually would be something that an administrator would need to go and flip a switch to switch him over. So, I think for the most part there's advantages to the clustering that you don't have with the warm back up. Right. The advantage of the warm backup is that psychologically it's much closer to what we're used to as traditional FileMaker developers. So, you know the idea of this third-party proxy, you know magically shuttling people to different servers can be very bizarre.
Dude just stop, just stop, just stop. I'm going to veto this right so Claris, Claris tried this Claris tried to do this, right? Yeah the standby server. For those you're wondering about that. And I'm not sure what I should say about that, I'm not supposed to like you know be overly. The thing is with this is like it's a mental thing so it's like you're saying if we're too old, like that's like uh I'm old and I'm in a wheelchair and I'm in my walker. I don't want to use a new one, it's too fancy for me right? What? I don't understand why this makes it listen. They tried this right? In order for you to switch so these people would fall so this server would blow up and I don't know Lexi was here for this or not.
Dude just stop, just stop, just stop. I'm going to veto this right so Claris, Claris tried this Claris tried to do this, right? Yeah the standby server. For those you're wondering about that. And I'm not sure what I should say about that, I'm not supposed to like you know be overly. The thing is with this is like it's a mental thing so it's like you're saying if we're too old, like that's like uh I'm old and I'm in a wheelchair and I'm in my walker. I don't want to use a new one, it's too fancy for me right? What? I don't understand why this makes it listen. They tried this right? In order for you to switch so these people would fall so this server would blow up and I don't know Lexi was here for this or not.
This server would blow up and then what would happen? These people all go "hey our stuff is offline and we're unemployed" and so then you have to find the it guy a little guy stick figure over here, right? And he has to go over here and come over here and do command line c slash backslash slash and do like four or five lines of backs. And then if you can find the guy one he's not playing some game online or two you can get him to log on then he can do a bunch of command line stuff and switch the line so they go over this way. Whereas this previous slide would have done it for you automatically, right? So it's like an automatic hostage negotiation with the IT guy assuming that your IT people are friendly and happy, right? I think that the warm backup is a good transition. I think that this is a very low risk quick win that you can set up immediately. You can show your client hey look this is working.
This server would blow up and then what would happen? These people all go "hey our stuff is offline and we're unemployed" and so then you have to find the it guy a little guy stick figure over here, right? And he has to go over here and come over here and do command line c slash backslash slash and do like four or five lines of backs. And then if you can find the guy one he's not playing some game online or two you can get him to log on then he can do a bunch of command line stuff and switch the line so they go over this way. Whereas this previous slide would have done it for you automatically, right? So it's like an automatic hostage negotiation with the IT guy assuming that your IT people are friendly and happy, right? I think that the warm backup is a good transition. I think that this is a very low risk quick win that you can set up immediately. You can show your client hey look this is working.
Then you can kind of go to our clustering scenario where you say how about if we make the sink bi-directional and we introduce a load balancer? So, I would say do this as a baby step, do the warm backup as a baby step, and then progress to the clustering. All right, if you say so chief we just I think we just get me just skip to the end and get to the one you want right so which is the whole point of what we're doing today, right? So I'm not I'm not trying to pedal. I'm not trying to pedal dog doo doo. Here yeah here we go baby let's go. So this now let me point out, before I really get to talking about this the land clustering option that I talked about before it's really important to understand that is for people that are in a single geographic region you know if all of your users are in one office or one state or one city or one pretty much relatively small area then the clustering option works really well.
Then you can kind of go to our clustering scenario where you say how about if we make the sink bi-directional and we introduce a load balancer? So, I would say do this as a baby step, do the warm backup as a baby step, and then progress to the clustering. All right, if you say so chief we just I think we just get me just skip to the end and get to the one you want right so which is the whole point of what we're doing today, right? So I'm not I'm not trying to pedal. I'm not trying to pedal dog doo doo. Here yeah here we go baby let's go. So this now let me point out, before I really get to talking about this the land clustering option that I talked about before it's really important to understand that is for people that are in a single geographic region you know if all of your users are in one office or one state or one city or one pretty much relatively small area then the clustering option works really well.
But it doesn't work that well when your users are in different continents or countries uh from each other. So then rather than doing like a random distribution where you know kind of a round robin, you get a server you get that server you get the server you get that server. It becomes a more geographic distribution. Basically everybody in this geographic area goes to this server everybody in that geographic area goes to that server and that way everybody has a reasonably fast connection. And that's what we've got set up as a demo, that's we're going to be showing you guys um and the idea here, notice that there's no load balancer. I'm going to jump back for two slides. Our orange box in this case is a load balancer. So people don't connect directly to the FileMaker server; they connect to the load balancer. The load balancer kind of magically talks to the FileMaker server for them.
But it doesn't work that well when your users are in different continents or countries uh from each other. So then rather than doing like a random distribution where you know kind of a round robin, you get a server you get that server you get the server you get that server. It becomes a more geographic distribution. Basically everybody in this geographic area goes to this server everybody in that geographic area goes to that server and that way everybody has a reasonably fast connection. And that's what we've got set up as a demo, that's we're going to be showing you guys um and the idea here, notice that there's no load balancer. I'm going to jump back for two slides. Our orange box in this case is a load balancer. So people don't connect directly to the FileMaker server; they connect to the load balancer. The load balancer kind of magically talks to the FileMaker server for them.
In this case, instead of a load balancer you have a DNS lookup. And so I've got some after these slides. If I have time, I'm going to jump to my browser. I'm going to show you guys how I've configured the DNS in order to enable this using a feature of Amazon called Latency Based Routing. And latency based routing is all it simply means is that, you will when you say what is the IP address of the server called FMSP.360works.com? Amazon won't just spit out an answer, it'll say "Let me see where you are?" Now, "Let me see where all the available servers are?" and now "Let me give you the IP address of whichever server is A closest to you and B up and running." And so, you will always go to the closest and fastest server that is up and running. The up and running is an important part, because if in this example, if the United States server goes down, Amazon will detect that and the next time that a United States person says "where is my closest server" Amazon won't send them to the dead server in the US, it will send them to the live server in Europe that might be slow but at least it's running. Right.
In this case, instead of a load balancer you have a DNS lookup. And so I've got some after these slides. If I have time, I'm going to jump to my browser. I'm going to show you guys how I've configured the DNS in order to enable this using a feature of Amazon called Latency Based Routing. And latency based routing is all it simply means is that, you will when you say what is the IP address of the server called FMSP.360works.com? Amazon won't just spit out an answer, it'll say "Let me see where you are?" Now, "Let me see where all the available servers are?" and now "Let me give you the IP address of whichever server is A closest to you and B up and running." And so, you will always go to the closest and fastest server that is up and running. The up and running is an important part, because if in this example, if the United States server goes down, Amazon will detect that and the next time that a United States person says "where is my closest server" Amazon won't send them to the dead server in the US, it will send them to the live server in Europe that might be slow but at least it's running. Right.
And that's the good part because in the event of a failure, what happens is people get routed to the next closest server which might be not obviously as fast, but it's better than zero, right? So yeah which is useful. So if people are bobbing up and down Alexis agreeing with us about the warm feature et cetera et cetera. Yeah, so I mean so what we got is about say we have about 15 minutes. We're gonna go about ten after then we're gonna roll it for today. But I do want to at some point today we're not going to walk all the way through to the end of have you know setting this up. I would kind of like to show it through the end product so people know that you know that is kind of working, right?
And that's the good part because in the event of a failure, what happens is people get routed to the next closest server which might be not obviously as fast, but it's better than zero, right? So yeah which is useful. So if people are bobbing up and down Alexis agreeing with us about the warm feature et cetera et cetera. Yeah, so I mean so what we got is about say we have about 15 minutes. We're gonna go about ten after then we're gonna roll it for today. But I do want to at some point today we're not going to walk all the way through to the end of have you know setting this up. I would kind of like to show it through the end product so people know that you know that is kind of working, right?
Even if we just log on to it. So yeah, okay? So before I get into that, uh I'll since I mentioned the wrap 53 thing I'll spend five minutes or less and just show that. Okay so my route 53 console here is so route 53 is Amazon's name for DNS and it's kind of a play on words because DNS runs on port 53. And so that's where Amazon came up with the name and so what I've done is I have created four health checks over my dashboard here. I'm in the health check section and I've got four copies of the FileMaker server running which Richard's staff worked kind of to set up for me. And we've got one in northern California, one in northern Virginia, one in Ireland, and one in Mumbai so that's one, two , three and four.
Even if we just log on to it. So yeah, okay? So before I get into that, uh I'll since I mentioned the wrap 53 thing I'll spend five minutes or less and just show that. Okay so my route 53 console here is so route 53 is Amazon's name for DNS and it's kind of a play on words because DNS runs on port 53. And so that's where Amazon came up with the name and so what I've done is I have created four health checks over my dashboard here. I'm in the health check section and I've got four copies of the FileMaker server running which Richard's staff worked kind of to set up for me. And we've got one in northern California, one in northern Virginia, one in Ireland, and one in Mumbai so that's one, two , three and four.
And so what I've done is I've configured Amazon to check this server by going to this URL and making sure that URL works. Hang on here, one more second, hang on because , I'm kind of zooming in so people can see this right, So all right so there you go so that's URL. Okay good so that is basically making a call to the data API saying what version of FileMaker server are you. I could come up with something a little bit more comprehensive to make sure the database did that kind of stuff but for demo purposes, this is sufficient. It just at least tells us that the FileMaker server is running and the data API is running. And so, in fact here just for fun let's go to Ireland and let's turn off their data API. And this will take a little bit because the checks happen every 30 seconds and there needs to be a certain number of checks that fail before it will really consider it to be dead. But if we check back later then I think what we'll notice is that FileMaker server three will show us unhealthy. Let's pause that, well there's pause for a second, so just so everyone's up to speed on this once again I'm not talking the Dalinskis and Folgers and the tk55678s for everyone else so, you can log on to Amazon when we say Amazon this is not the shopping part of Amazon this is the backend data center technical stuff and you can run your own virtual server here.
And so what I've done is I've configured Amazon to check this server by going to this URL and making sure that URL works. Hang on here, one more second, hang on because , I'm kind of zooming in so people can see this right, So all right so there you go so that's URL. Okay good so that is basically making a call to the data API saying what version of FileMaker server are you. I could come up with something a little bit more comprehensive to make sure the database did that kind of stuff but for demo purposes, this is sufficient. It just at least tells us that the FileMaker server is running and the data API is running. And so, in fact here just for fun let's go to Ireland and let's turn off their data API. And this will take a little bit because the checks happen every 30 seconds and there needs to be a certain number of checks that fail before it will really consider it to be dead. But if we check back later then I think what we'll notice is that FileMaker server three will show us unhealthy. Let's pause that, well there's pause for a second, so just so everyone's up to speed on this once again I'm not talking the Dalinskis and Folgers and the tk55678s for everyone else so, you can log on to Amazon when we say Amazon this is not the shopping part of Amazon this is the backend data center technical stuff and you can run your own virtual server here.
In fact Jesse, can you show us the current home screen for them because they revised that on a year or two again right they changed the uh to this so basically for those of you who've never seen this before just as a basic sort of thing. Yeah back yeah all the way out to the super that one okay so scroll to the top so this is when you log on to Amazon and you have your own server. These are all the really cool things that it can do down here and I know it's kind of chunky and it's kind of hard to see but I mean if you log on you can see you know every one of these if you're an IT person is really interesting. Okay hang on Jesse, quit moving because when you move then it's chunking here so you got easy so much. Yeah, I know. There's EC2 where we build our virtual FileMaker server right we have the S3 is where we have our big you know hard drive in the sky for storage right then there's S3 glacier which is super cheap but kind of goofy uh slower back storage if you have like you know many many many terabytes to store on an ongoing basis.
In fact Jesse, can you show us the current home screen for them because they revised that on a year or two again right they changed the uh to this so basically for those of you who've never seen this before just as a basic sort of thing. Yeah back yeah all the way out to the super that one okay so scroll to the top so this is when you log on to Amazon and you have your own server. These are all the really cool things that it can do down here and I know it's kind of chunky and it's kind of hard to see but I mean if you log on you can see you know every one of these if you're an IT person is really interesting. Okay hang on Jesse, quit moving because when you move then it's chunking here so you got easy so much. Yeah, I know. There's EC2 where we build our virtual FileMaker server right we have the S3 is where we have our big you know hard drive in the sky for storage right then there's S3 glacier which is super cheap but kind of goofy uh slower back storage if you have like you know many many many terabytes to store on an ongoing basis.
I mean all sorts of stuff are in here crazy and then you saw at the top was route 53 so this is basically a computer developer/programmers, you know the most funnest location ever because there's always something new to learn in here because they're always adding new things. So if you back up a little bit Jesse for me if you go back up , assuming he's there hello Jesse there we go yeah so you see yeah you see the route 53, so this is a separate service separate than the verdict virtual servers right so route53 is our checking the health check. So if you want to go back, it should be updated now. Yeah, so let's take a look here. Oh man, oh there it goes unhealthy. And if I go here and I go to monitor, here's all those checks that worked. And then here's where the checks started to fail. Yeah and so what'll happen is if somebody in Europe were to try to go to the server right now, Amazon would exclude Ireland from the check and it would send them to whichever the server was closest whichever service closest either Mumbai, Northern Virginia or West Coast and I don't know which one would be but Amazon would figure that out and send you to the right place right.
I mean all sorts of stuff are in here crazy and then you saw at the top was route 53 so this is basically a computer developer/programmers, you know the most funnest location ever because there's always something new to learn in here because they're always adding new things. So if you back up a little bit Jesse for me if you go back up , assuming he's there hello Jesse there we go yeah so you see yeah you see the route 53, so this is a separate service separate than the verdict virtual servers right so route53 is our checking the health check. So if you want to go back, it should be updated now. Yeah, so let's take a look here. Oh man, oh there it goes unhealthy. And if I go here and I go to monitor, here's all those checks that worked. And then here's where the checks started to fail. Yeah and so what'll happen is if somebody in Europe were to try to go to the server right now, Amazon would exclude Ireland from the check and it would send them to whichever the server was closest whichever service closest either Mumbai, Northern Virginia or West Coast and I don't know which one would be but Amazon would figure that out and send you to the right place right.
And I mean if you're really serious about this you'd have a server in Germany and a server in Ireland and you could put them all over the place, right? So there's not really a limit here, cool! All right so that part of it and then the last ingredient here is so these are the health checks. This is where I've got to open this other tab right here. These are the health checks which I've turned this back on so before long it'll come back and say healthy. And then once you've configured the health checks then you configure the actual DNS entries. And so I've created an entry called FMSPDEMO.360works.com and you know I'm not gonna I'm just gonna talk really quickly about this and we can watch the video if we want but basically, you set up a CNAME which is kind of an alias to some other server I like to set a really short time to live so that I can change it anytime I want and have it be cached for a long time then which real server it's going to so the FMSPDEMO.360works.com for the us east will go to this is the actual host name here of the real server. And then this routing policy is the norm. Simple just means this server goes to that address but latency means I know this server is running in this region and this is the health check that goes with it and so find you know which of these four things are in the region closest to where the user is.
And I mean if you're really serious about this you'd have a server in Germany and a server in Ireland and you could put them all over the place, right? So there's not really a limit here, cool! All right so that part of it and then the last ingredient here is so these are the health checks. This is where I've got to open this other tab right here. These are the health checks which I've turned this back on so before long it'll come back and say healthy. And then once you've configured the health checks then you configure the actual DNS entries. And so I've created an entry called FMSPDEMO.360works.com and you know I'm not gonna I'm just gonna talk really quickly about this and we can watch the video if we want but basically, you set up a CNAME which is kind of an alias to some other server I like to set a really short time to live so that I can change it anytime I want and have it be cached for a long time then which real server it's going to so the FMSPDEMO.360works.com for the us east will go to this is the actual host name here of the real server. And then this routing policy is the norm. Simple just means this server goes to that address but latency means I know this server is running in this region and this is the health check that goes with it and so find you know which of these four things are in the region closest to where the user is.
That's how you can set up latency based DNS and that's the key to making this kind of work smoothly for users no matter where they are. All right so I'm going to repeat these questions and let you handle them Jesse so, this is from Muhammad and he says hello Richard on FMP if you uh on FileMaker I guess FileMaker platform if hosted on Amazon what are the hidden costs as a customer usually have to pay for extra bandwidth consumption, I mean the answer is bandwidth out you definitely pay for bandwidth in not so much right isn't that how that works. Yeah! Bandwidth and is free bandwidth out is nine cents per gigabyte you have to accumulate a very large amount of traffic to have a significant amount of fees from data out. Okay and then I mean if you're doing 20 gigs a month which is a whole lot that's a dollar 80 per month. Yeah so Muhammad also had another question here which potentially concerns me if I'm understand I'm going to discuss I'm going to tell you well the your redraw there needs to catch up so he asked the question. Yeah we'd have to let the screen redraw it's lost its mind he asked the question also can we host FMP apps on a shared cloud storage and have server redundancy question? I'm not sure I understand the question exactly, shared cloud storage sounds like S3 or something, right? Right, and no you cannot put a FileMaker database on S3 you can absolutely do that and anybody who wants to can download that database and work on their own copy the database that works too. What you can't do is you're not going to be able to merge that data together in any simple way. Mirror-sync won't do it. FileMaker server is not even involved, so you would only do shared storage if you want each user to have their own separate copy that's their own local copy that doesn't sync anything.
That's how you can set up latency based DNS and that's the key to making this kind of work smoothly for users no matter where they are. All right so I'm going to repeat these questions and let you handle them Jesse so, this is from Muhammad and he says hello Richard on FMP if you uh on FileMaker I guess FileMaker platform if hosted on Amazon what are the hidden costs as a customer usually have to pay for extra bandwidth consumption, I mean the answer is bandwidth out you definitely pay for bandwidth in not so much right isn't that how that works. Yeah! Bandwidth and is free bandwidth out is nine cents per gigabyte you have to accumulate a very large amount of traffic to have a significant amount of fees from data out. Okay and then I mean if you're doing 20 gigs a month which is a whole lot that's a dollar 80 per month. Yeah so Muhammad also had another question here which potentially concerns me if I'm understand I'm going to discuss I'm going to tell you well the your redraw there needs to catch up so he asked the question. Yeah we'd have to let the screen redraw it's lost its mind he asked the question also can we host FMP apps on a shared cloud storage and have server redundancy question? I'm not sure I understand the question exactly, shared cloud storage sounds like S3 or something, right? Right, and no you cannot put a FileMaker database on S3 you can absolutely do that and anybody who wants to can download that database and work on their own copy the database that works too. What you can't do is you're not going to be able to merge that data together in any simple way. Mirror-sync won't do it. FileMaker server is not even involved, so you would only do shared storage if you want each user to have their own separate copy that's their own local copy that doesn't sync anything.
You wanted that data to sync to something then you would need to have FileMaker server involved and you would need to have mirror-sync involved. And then at that point it's not clear that there would be any advantage to even having the FileMaker databases located on S3 to stick with. You could, you could put them anywhere you could put in drop box or S3 or just download it directly from FileMaker server but you would need mirror-sync and FileMaker server if you wanted those offline copies to be able to share data with each other. Yeah I think I can't tell but sometimes these conversations are conversations about how do I use this without using FileMaker server and the answer is you, if you just want to put it in like storage like you're going to still store a piece of meat in the freezer or if you don't like meat whatever you want to put in the freezer. But the point is that it's not really easily edible in the freezer but that's kind of what S3 is or this cloud storage is.
You wanted that data to sync to something then you would need to have FileMaker server involved and you would need to have mirror-sync involved. And then at that point it's not clear that there would be any advantage to even having the FileMaker databases located on S3 to stick with. You could, you could put them anywhere you could put in drop box or S3 or just download it directly from FileMaker server but you would need mirror-sync and FileMaker server if you wanted those offline copies to be able to share data with each other. Yeah I think I can't tell but sometimes these conversations are conversations about how do I use this without using FileMaker server and the answer is you, if you just want to put it in like storage like you're going to still store a piece of meat in the freezer or if you don't like meat whatever you want to put in the freezer. But the point is that it's not really easily edible in the freezer but that's kind of what S3 is or this cloud storage is.
If you want to have people actually accessing it and actively using it it has to be on a FileMaker server and so the conversation is about not one FileMaker server but three FileMaker servers or four FileMaker servers. And if you buy a license say like you buy a 10 pack or 20 pack or 30 pack of FileMaker, you're going to get three servers that you can use right most people just use one but you actually get three set up in different regions, so I we're back this conversation how do I share with the world without paying for it I think is I'm guessing that's kind of the the question, right? So this, I mean we're in an area here where not only do you have to buy FileMaker server you have to buy mirror-sync and mirror-sync is not free but I think it's worth its weight in gold, right? Absolutely! Without a question.
If you want to have people actually accessing it and actively using it it has to be on a FileMaker server and so the conversation is about not one FileMaker server but three FileMaker servers or four FileMaker servers. And if you buy a license say like you buy a 10 pack or 20 pack or 30 pack of FileMaker, you're going to get three servers that you can use right most people just use one but you actually get three set up in different regions, so I we're back this conversation how do I share with the world without paying for it I think is I'm guessing that's kind of the the question, right? So this, I mean we're in an area here where not only do you have to buy FileMaker server you have to buy mirror-sync and mirror-sync is not free but I think it's worth its weight in gold, right? Absolutely! Without a question.
So we're coming up at five o'clock, I know Richard, you wanted to do a quick demo. Did we want to have people connect to the server today? Not today we're gonna invite everyone in over the next couple days. At some point we're gonna have more awesomeness. We haven't even gone through the FileMaker file or any of that kind of stuff or kind of what we've got cooked up but why can you open, why don't you open it on your end and I can open one on my end that'll be kind of funny. So I need to go to a host so how can I add a host people are going to be like hey Richard we're going to do this with you. Show host what'd you say the host name was for FMSPDEMO.360works.com. Notice we're going to save okay and get the SSL, okay I'm going to open this up now when I'm going to open this up we're not going to share the password everyone just yet. But that will be coming so then, now Jesse opened it up on your it's the title my end it flashed during the start but it's in Northern Virginia. Okay mine says Northern California, right here so you see that everybody. I'm in Atlanta Georgia okay so he's here so he's on the East Coast on the West Side that's why sometimes the screen is a little chunky. Now let's go to contacts real quick, each of us go to contacts and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to, I'm going to create it's kind of chunking a little bit but we're trying this.
So we're coming up at five o'clock, I know Richard, you wanted to do a quick demo. Did we want to have people connect to the server today? Not today we're gonna invite everyone in over the next couple days. At some point we're gonna have more awesomeness. We haven't even gone through the FileMaker file or any of that kind of stuff or kind of what we've got cooked up but why can you open, why don't you open it on your end and I can open one on my end that'll be kind of funny. So I need to go to a host so how can I add a host people are going to be like hey Richard we're going to do this with you. Show host what'd you say the host name was for FMSPDEMO.360works.com. Notice we're going to save okay and get the SSL, okay I'm going to open this up now when I'm going to open this up we're not going to share the password everyone just yet. But that will be coming so then, now Jesse opened it up on your it's the title my end it flashed during the start but it's in Northern Virginia. Okay mine says Northern California, right here so you see that everybody. I'm in Atlanta Georgia okay so he's here so he's on the East Coast on the West Side that's why sometimes the screen is a little chunky. Now let's go to contacts real quick, each of us go to contacts and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to, I'm going to create it's kind of chunking a little bit but we're trying this.
Hang on, everyone stand by. I'm going to, what we're going to do is I'm going to create a or do you want to create a record Jesse you want to put a record on your end and then do you have a picture no like create one for Alexis. I don't have a picture of Alexi though. So I don't know what you're going to do there. I've gone either handy okay okay now I got record six. Now the automatic syncing is going on and it's replicating so we're waiting for that to happen. Oh record seven is here now. So that is two different copies of FM Starting Point enterprise edition, the enterprise one that we have um and it synced. And we haven't even got the conversation whether we're both working on Alexi at the same time. That's a conversation for another day that we are going to you know we got three more days of this but we want to show this now what if I yeah what's important what's it what's the important.
Hang on, everyone stand by. I'm going to, what we're going to do is I'm going to create a or do you want to create a record Jesse you want to put a record on your end and then do you have a picture no like create one for Alexis. I don't have a picture of Alexi though. So I don't know what you're going to do there. I've gone either handy okay okay now I got record six. Now the automatic syncing is going on and it's replicating so we're waiting for that to happen. Oh record seven is here now. So that is two different copies of FM Starting Point enterprise edition, the enterprise one that we have um and it synced. And we haven't even got the conversation whether we're both working on Alexi at the same time. That's a conversation for another day that we are going to you know we got three more days of this but we want to show this now what if I yeah what's important what's it what's the important.
Summarize what just happened because we're all used to the idea that okay Richard changes something and I said I changed something and Richard sees it so what's cool about what we just did? Why is this interesting? The cool and interesting thing is I changed it on a different server than him I changed my I changed I made my change on a server running in Virginia. Richard made his change on the server running in California and then we both saw each other's changes because mirror-sync is running in the background bringing both of those servers up to date with each other. So that's kind of the essence of what we're trying to do here. I just did it again, which was about a second and a half delay. That's what we're talking about now. Imagine this thing replicating now instead of just the east coast of the United States the West Coast United States but there are the servers also in Mumbai India. and also in Ireland. And then we might even put one together for Australia if we want to throw one together we'll have to talk about that.
Summarize what just happened because we're all used to the idea that okay Richard changes something and I said I changed something and Richard sees it so what's cool about what we just did? Why is this interesting? The cool and interesting thing is I changed it on a different server than him I changed my I changed I made my change on a server running in Virginia. Richard made his change on the server running in California and then we both saw each other's changes because mirror-sync is running in the background bringing both of those servers up to date with each other. So that's kind of the essence of what we're trying to do here. I just did it again, which was about a second and a half delay. That's what we're talking about now. Imagine this thing replicating now instead of just the east coast of the United States the West Coast United States but there are the servers also in Mumbai India. and also in Ireland. And then we might even put one together for Australia if we want to throw one together we'll have to talk about that.
So, Stephen Dolinsky has a question, if you have a dev server and use DMT which is a data migration tool or deploy or auto I'm sorry we can't say the word auto in this broadcast, what is the workflow with databases in different locations to ensure that they are synced with the latest version? Stephen Dolinsky, I am sorry to say that you have to come back tomorrow, for that actually that's not true we are going to talk about that, that's a big part of it Stephen's like oh I just wanted everything in one hour most people are not as smart as Stephen Dolinsky here, right? So ,I got to bring everyone along so the question is if you change a file in location A how do we replicate that everywhere right we are going to do that. It's going to be awesome! It's very doable, it's very simple, simple right? You just want to walk, do a verbal real quick on that don't do it because we have to have a reason people come back tomorrow, right?
So, Stephen Dolinsky has a question, if you have a dev server and use DMT which is a data migration tool or deploy or auto I'm sorry we can't say the word auto in this broadcast, what is the workflow with databases in different locations to ensure that they are synced with the latest version? Stephen Dolinsky, I am sorry to say that you have to come back tomorrow, for that actually that's not true we are going to talk about that, that's a big part of it Stephen's like oh I just wanted everything in one hour most people are not as smart as Stephen Dolinsky here, right? So ,I got to bring everyone along so the question is if you change a file in location A how do we replicate that everywhere right we are going to do that. It's going to be awesome! It's very doable, it's very simple, simple right? You just want to walk, do a verbal real quick on that don't do it because we have to have a reason people come back tomorrow, right?
So well it's basically you change one field in the mirror-sync, so the first before I even answer the question I think the first I would start with a question of my own which is if you do have a testing server and maybe a deployment server, what is your goal with the data? Do you want the data to be the same in both FMtraining.tvf those or do you want the testing server to have a testing copy the data and a and this and the deployment server to have a deployment copy the database? If you want the data to be different you know if you want testing data testing server and live data on the production server then mirror sync doesn't really even enter into the equation. You would use one of the tools you mentioned. I would highly recommend our product 360 deploy which does that very well. Yeah and so you wouldn't need mirror-sync if you didn't want the data to be the same on both of those servers. But let's say that you had uh like a staging server and a production server and you wanted those to be identical to each other.
So well it's basically you change one field in the mirror-sync, so the first before I even answer the question I think the first I would start with a question of my own which is if you do have a testing server and maybe a deployment server, what is your goal with the data? Do you want the data to be the same in both FMtraining.tvf those or do you want the testing server to have a testing copy the data and a and this and the deployment server to have a deployment copy the database? If you want the data to be different you know if you want testing data testing server and live data on the production server then mirror sync doesn't really even enter into the equation. You would use one of the tools you mentioned. I would highly recommend our product 360 deploy which does that very well. Yeah and so you wouldn't need mirror-sync if you didn't want the data to be the same on both of those servers. But let's say that you had uh like a staging server and a production server and you wanted those to be identical to each other.
Then you would do that by going into you would get everything set to go on the staging server. You would have a sync running so the staging server has the same data as the production server and then when you're ready to deploy it to the production server. You would just go into the mirror sync table and there's a field with a calculation in there you would change that calculation mirror-sync would see that the calculation changed and on the next sync it would take a full copy of that database from the staging server and move it with all of its data onto the deployment server. So yeah, so it's a question of whether you'd use deploy or I don't know I mean I'd be in yeah because deploy is where you're going to get that data migration tool.
Then you would do that by going into you would get everything set to go on the staging server. You would have a sync running so the staging server has the same data as the production server and then when you're ready to deploy it to the production server. You would just go into the mirror sync table and there's a field with a calculation in there you would change that calculation mirror-sync would see that the calculation changed and on the next sync it would take a full copy of that database from the staging server and move it with all of its data onto the deployment server. So yeah, so it's a question of whether you'd use deploy or I don't know I mean I'd be in yeah because deploy is where you're going to get that data migration tool.
For those of you who are new, we have a whole set of training so here comes as we wrap up the broadcast here, for those of Alexi you haven't seen this before this is kind of funny so this is where we have to put the the shameless plug in here so you're everyone ready for. This is all right, all right. This broadcast is brought to you by FMtraining.tv bringing you the greatest in FileMaker on demand video training visit FMtrading.tv. And right and then we have bundles here and if you're looking for a Double Double Bundle you can do that if you're looking for Jessie's awesomeness where is the so if you want the Jesse 15 percent off mirror sink deal that expires on June 26 it turns to a pumpkin that's the deal you want highly recommend it.
For those of you who are new, we have a whole set of training so here comes as we wrap up the broadcast here, for those of Alexi you haven't seen this before this is kind of funny so this is where we have to put the the shameless plug in here so you're everyone ready for. This is all right, all right. This broadcast is brought to you by FMtraining.tv bringing you the greatest in FileMaker on demand video training visit FMtrading.tv. And right and then we have bundles here and if you're looking for a Double Double Bundle you can do that if you're looking for Jessie's awesomeness where is the so if you want the Jesse 15 percent off mirror sink deal that expires on June 26 it turns to a pumpkin that's the deal you want highly recommend it.
So, but yeah, I mean we for a lot of the awesome FileMaker people here we do a lot of training a lot of it's kind of more beginning, intermediate, some super advanced stuff this I think uh as we go along here from day to day we're going to keep cracking open the level difficulty. Let Jesse get into the code, talk about what happens if we both edit Alexi at the same time and then she hits in between what happens to Alexi. Does she die a horrible death? How is that handled right? Those are all great questions and to be honest with you we have this CRM called FM Starting Point we've been giving away. And we actually went through a process because we use it a lot for training, but it's really been Lean Designed by Nick Hunter, there's you know Nick Hunter and it's got a great interface but it's been really optimized for high performance right? We know it'll do 260 300 400 people on a single FileMaker server.
So, but yeah, I mean we for a lot of the awesome FileMaker people here we do a lot of training a lot of it's kind of more beginning, intermediate, some super advanced stuff this I think uh as we go along here from day to day we're going to keep cracking open the level difficulty. Let Jesse get into the code, talk about what happens if we both edit Alexi at the same time and then she hits in between what happens to Alexi. Does she die a horrible death? How is that handled right? Those are all great questions and to be honest with you we have this CRM called FM Starting Point we've been giving away. And we actually went through a process because we use it a lot for training, but it's really been Lean Designed by Nick Hunter, there's you know Nick Hunter and it's got a great interface but it's been really optimized for high performance right? We know it'll do 260 300 400 people on a single FileMaker server.
So we took it, we adjusted it so it works great with mirror-sync and so that is kind of like the default demo go to CRM because we also know it'll deploy around the world. It's already working around the world right now. We just only have so much time to show you. So uh so yeah so if you folks are around once again if you can't make it tomorrow it will be recorded but if you're here in person you can ask questions which is really awesome. Alexi says paying full price for mirror-sync is way cheaper than rolling your own yeah. I had an engineer and to Alexi's comment, I was seeing if she saw this is why Alexi was so great. God I missed seeing her around so I had an insurer come to me and he was like I'm going to roll my own sink. I'm not going to play that Jesse stuff or whatever it was it goes INC or whatever the price think was and he goes I'll rule my own and I'm like okay I'm like okay but good luck with that and so like two months later comes back "I'll never do that again that was the worst it was so hard" and I'm talking about a guy who's really quite talented but his ego got ahead of the equation so um yeah so uh yeah so definitely if you can use Jesse Barnum's brain which is much better than most of ours, do it right? And then Stephen Dolinski FMP natively isn't acidic? Yeah so I didn't want to get into acid once again Stephen because yeah the acid is like the super redundancy availability kind of capability.
So we took it, we adjusted it so it works great with mirror-sync and so that is kind of like the default demo go to CRM because we also know it'll deploy around the world. It's already working around the world right now. We just only have so much time to show you. So uh so yeah so if you folks are around once again if you can't make it tomorrow it will be recorded but if you're here in person you can ask questions which is really awesome. Alexi says paying full price for mirror-sync is way cheaper than rolling your own yeah. I had an engineer and to Alexi's comment, I was seeing if she saw this is why Alexi was so great. God I missed seeing her around so I had an insurer come to me and he was like I'm going to roll my own sink. I'm not going to play that Jesse stuff or whatever it was it goes INC or whatever the price think was and he goes I'll rule my own and I'm like okay I'm like okay but good luck with that and so like two months later comes back "I'll never do that again that was the worst it was so hard" and I'm talking about a guy who's really quite talented but his ego got ahead of the equation so um yeah so uh yeah so definitely if you can use Jesse Barnum's brain which is much better than most of ours, do it right? And then Stephen Dolinski FMP natively isn't acidic? Yeah so I didn't want to get into acid once again Stephen because yeah the acid is like the super redundancy availability kind of capability.
I think if you have vigorous backups and you have a uh and you're using like mirror-sync to like either replicate locally or around the world, I think that the question is the question whether FMSP is acid no he's just making a statement Stephen was just saying yeah it isn't natively acid so tools like this get us further down the road which is absolutely I'm just agreeing. So yeah yeah I mean right so that's the thing right? So I mean the idea is that having multiple servers and then one server can back up for another server. It doesn't really solve the transactional kind of thing but if you're a talented developer you can do kind of transactional kind of stuff with FileMaker. Well the fundamental problem with trying to do distributed transactional databases is the idea that you know if you commit it on one server, you know that it's been committed on all the servers around the world. That sounds like a great idea but the problem is it thwarts the whole idea of why you're doing it in the first place which is to improve performance and scalability. Because what that means is that, if you're if you're going to a server that's nice and close and convenient to you and you commit a record now that server can't return a successful result to you until it's talked to the other three servers all around the world and make sure that people committed it too.
I think if you have vigorous backups and you have a uh and you're using like mirror-sync to like either replicate locally or around the world, I think that the question is the question whether FMSP is acid no he's just making a statement Stephen was just saying yeah it isn't natively acid so tools like this get us further down the road which is absolutely I'm just agreeing. So yeah yeah I mean right so that's the thing right? So I mean the idea is that having multiple servers and then one server can back up for another server. It doesn't really solve the transactional kind of thing but if you're a talented developer you can do kind of transactional kind of stuff with FileMaker. Well the fundamental problem with trying to do distributed transactional databases is the idea that you know if you commit it on one server, you know that it's been committed on all the servers around the world. That sounds like a great idea but the problem is it thwarts the whole idea of why you're doing it in the first place which is to improve performance and scalability. Because what that means is that, if you're if you're going to a server that's nice and close and convenient to you and you commit a record now that server can't return a successful result to you until it's talked to the other three servers all around the world and make sure that people committed it too.
So you wind up working at whatever the slowest speed is of the connection between all the different servers and so you know mirror-sync and was and you'll see that in other database relational systems where they'll talk about synchronous transactions meaning that uh synchronous mainly all happen at the same time meaning that it happens that whatever the slowest transaction is that completes. I think in general we want this to be asynchronous. We want it to be non-transactional because we want to be able to know that we're working at a fast speed to a local server instead of waiting for the latency all around the world. We just yeah, we just need a plan to triage the uh the coalition the double Alexi collision thing. So yes which we'll talk about tomorrow we're going to talk about that tomorrow so everyone I want to appreciate you coming to FMtraining.tv once again don't forget to keep an eye on this if you want to sign up and get a reminder click on that down there you'll be talking to your our FileMaker server and it will load you into a database and it'll send you a reminder which is useful.
So you wind up working at whatever the slowest speed is of the connection between all the different servers and so you know mirror-sync and was and you'll see that in other database relational systems where they'll talk about synchronous transactions meaning that uh synchronous mainly all happen at the same time meaning that it happens that whatever the slowest transaction is that completes. I think in general we want this to be asynchronous. We want it to be non-transactional because we want to be able to know that we're working at a fast speed to a local server instead of waiting for the latency all around the world. We just yeah, we just need a plan to triage the uh the coalition the double Alexi collision thing. So yes which we'll talk about tomorrow we're going to talk about that tomorrow so everyone I want to appreciate you coming to FMtraining.tv once again don't forget to keep an eye on this if you want to sign up and get a reminder click on that down there you'll be talking to your our FileMaker server and it will load you into a database and it'll send you a reminder which is useful.
You can watch it on Twitch on YouTube or get the discord invite which is up here and uh and then you can participate and Lexi and Stephen and folks over here definitely wanna if you wanna check that out feel free. Because it's kind of a persistent conversation, it's ongoing. Um, we're kind of building a community here of people who are trying to learn because that's why I do training. That's pretty much what I do all the time. So anyway uh uh Dolinski had one last question: can uh mirror-sync potentially do be an audit log? We don't really sell it that way. It does actually keep an internal audit log and it will record a log file record into a text file every time that it writes a change from one server to another.fmtraining.tv
You can watch it on Twitch on YouTube or get the discord invite which is up here and uh and then you can participate and Lexi and Stephen and folks over here definitely wanna if you wanna check that out feel free. Because it's kind of a persistent conversation, it's ongoing. Um, we're kind of building a community here of people who are trying to learn because that's why I do training. That's pretty much what I do all the time. So anyway uh uh Dolinski had one last question: can uh mirror-sync potentially do be an audit log? We don't really sell it that way. It does actually keep an internal audit log and it will record a log file record into a text file every time that it writes a change from one server to another.fmtraining.tv
It's not really it, it's not really written in a way that's designed to be like easily pulled back into FileMaker or queried; it's more for a human being to be able to go back later and say why did this record change from this to that. The other, there's a big limitation of it for audit logging purposes which is the way we do deletion scanning and deletion detection. And that's kind of maybe a little bit too long of an answer for right now but the really short version of it is mirror-sync doesn't know who deleted a record or when they deleted it. It only knows that a record was deleted uh and so a lot of why you want to do audit logging is to know who and when not just whether. So it has limitations for purposes of audit logging.
It's not really it, it's not really written in a way that's designed to be like easily pulled back into FileMaker or queried; it's more for a human being to be able to go back later and say why did this record change from this to that. The other, there's a big limitation of it for audit logging purposes which is the way we do deletion scanning and deletion detection. And that's kind of maybe a little bit too long of an answer for right now but the really short version of it is mirror-sync doesn't know who deleted a record or when they deleted it. It only knows that a record was deleted uh and so a lot of why you want to do audit logging is to know who and when not just whether. So it has limitations for purposes of audit logging.
All right everyone, I appreciate it. We'll be back tomorrow at one o'clock at the same time, same place, same channel one thanks to Ken, Nathan, Schneider, Dave one, Dave two, Lexi, Stephen, Dennis, Michael all the people from around the world literally a worldwide audience here. Once this is recorded you'll be able to catch the recording a little bit cleaned up it'll be on YouTube etc. But in the meantime we'll catch you tomorrow and for now Jesse and I and the folks at 360works see you later.
All right everyone, I appreciate it. We'll be back tomorrow at one o'clock at the same time, same place, same channel one thanks to Ken, Nathan, Schneider, Dave one, Dave two, Lexi, Stephen, Dennis, Michael all the people from around the world literally a worldwide audience here. Once this is recorded you'll be able to catch the recording a little bit cleaned up it'll be on YouTube etc. But in the meantime we'll catch you tomorrow and for now Jesse and I and the folks at 360works see you later.
See you guys! Thanks Richard.
See you guys! Thanks Richard.
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