Taking FileMaker to the Enterprise - Summary
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Taking FileMaker to the Enterprise - Summary
Transcript
Taking FileMaker to the Enterprise - Summary
In this video, I want to provide an executive summary of a recent series of live streams that we did with the FileMaker platform explicitly targeting the enterprise. Now as most of you know, FileMaker has not historically been considered an enterprise level tool. However with the use of some third-party software and some great design practices in terms of building a custom application, you can build an enterprise solution and we demonstrated it here. Now when most people think about deploying a FileMaker solution to the enterprise, they think about multiple servers which can automatically replicate the data and provide emergency fail over services, so people can continue to work even if a server goes down or even if multiple servers go down. Well historically this has not been something FileMaker has been capable of. However with the use of mirror-sync which is a third-party product and by leveraging a very lean database structure we're able to support FileMaker servers in multiple geographical regions. So the idea is to take a FileMaker server installation and actually replicate that across multiple ec2 servers across multiple amazon regions which is what we did.
We actually set up servers in a US West Region US East Region in the EU specifically in Ireland in that case, we also set up servers in Mumbai India and Australia. And of course, we could have extended to many other regions like japan as well. Now the idea of course is to have users access the closest FileMaker server and this provides the greatest possible performance for a FileMaker custom application. So by leveraging Amazon's route 53 which we covered during our livestream users, are provided a DNS link which actually goes through route 53 and determines the server with the lowest latency for their specific situation. And based upon that the users are directed to the closest FileMaker server. Meanwhile about every five seconds any data edits that are made on one server are replicated to the other servers. And so as users interact with the data, data is pushed worldwide through a single CRM system to all users.
In the event that two users edit the same record, the mirror sync software is able to thread those two records together by identifying the individual changes and combining those changes to make one complete record. Of course, one of the hallmarks of an enterprise level solution is fault tolerance. In the event that you run into a server that actually fails, that group of users would be temporarily disrupted, and of course they would quit and reopen their application, at which time Amazon would route them to the closest available functioning server. Because Amazon's route 53 is not only able to determine the closest server, it actually directs them to the closest functional server which is really important. Meanwhile, it support can be summoned and that team can restart the server and restore that database from a backup.
Of course one of the amazing things about mirror-sync is that it sees that it is working with a backup copy in Australia and that backup copy is minutes old or hours old. And it knows it's out of date so the first thing that mirror-sync will do is bring it up to date so no data loss occurs by the outage in Australia. So the Australian backup is quickly rolled forward with the important edits that were preserved and saved on the other servers. Once that update process is complete, the local users can quit and reopen their application and once again amazon route 53 will direct them to the closest functional server. And of course they have no idea this is actually happening. Now we can actually try this out in real time right now. I'm currently based in California so Amazon's route 53 will be able to establish quickly that I should be talking to the US West server with the lowest latency. And so, I can press open the closest server right here, it's actually going to direct me to the closest server which happens to be up here in Northern California. And of course performance with this application is pretty snappy due to two main issues. One is that we're accessing a fairly close FileMaker server with low latency. And the second issue is that we designed this copy of our free CRM with extreme lean design in mind. And of course people ask what is lean design? It's the process of building very efficient software that operates as quickly as possible with the minimum amount of network traffic. And so this is our FM Starting Point product, so it worked during this five day live stream training event at full speed it was great. We had people connected all the way around the world. And of course, you can see some of that because if you come over to this launcher we can bypass route 53 by specifically connecting to a server so i can connect to the US East which we know is about 90 milliseconds in speed.
And so the speed is about three times slower than it is if I connect to the US West server. Now to show you what I mean about latency, let's take a look at a network analysis application. It's a very basic apple utility and of course you could run this on windows. And what we're going to do is we're going to do a ping test say 10 pings we're going to start with the closest server this is US West server this should be pretty close. So as I run this we're getting 25,19,23 basically, latency times that are less than 30 which is pretty good performance. Of course, it's not as good as a server that was in your same building, but for a server that's actually probably 50 to 75 miles away from my current location, that's pretty respectable. If I jump across the united states which is about 3 100 miles thereabouts you're going to be looking at substantially longer ping times.
And the ping times during our livestream typically ran about 90 milliseconds. We see that right here, I think you have a couple outliers here, I could run it again you're going to see consistent ping times between 80 and 100 milliseconds. And it's pretty consistent in that range keep in mind Claris documentation explicitly states that they recommend a server connection latency of no greater than 150 milliseconds. So once again with milliseconds you want a smaller number. Milliseconds are the delay as your packet of information goes across the internet so you want the smallest delay possible with the smallest number possible so Claris says 150 milliseconds or less so East Coast to West Coast is still okay but it's noticeably slower. What if we want to go to Europe and specifically Ireland at this time from the West Coast United States to Ireland how long will that take? Well, if you run the same test we're getting milliseconds in the 170 range which exceed Claris recommendation.
Now if you have offices in Europe, you would want to deploy servers to Ireland or to Germany or whatever other regions that Amazon has in that area that would provide the best possible performance. You're not just limited to Ireland that's just the limit of what our test did and here you can see some really consistent results 170 milliseconds those are very consistent. I want to go to Australia because that's the next one in terms of performance I'm going to go to Australia and we're going to see ping times that are actually a little bit shorter which is interesting so from California the west coast united states to Ireland or to Australia the performance is about the same. This is about the fastest I've ever seen Australia, typically it's a little bit slower than this but it is kind of a Friday night a lot of people have knocked off I think you're getting a little bit better bandwidth through there but that's pretty consistent numbers there we see a couple 170's. I see a lot of 170s that's not uncommon so understand that once again we're beyond what Claris says is their maximum. Let's go to Mumbai India and of course I already know that that represents our slowest connection speed I also verified this data from the East Coast of the United States earlier today. We can check out that server and we're seeing latency approaching 300 which is double the maximum of what Claris recommends.
So instead of setting up one FileMaker server for all your users worldwide to connect to, you need to really think about having local FileMaker servers that feature this replication technology from mirror-sync. Now to show you how this works and how cool this really is, I'm going to go ahead and log on to my closest server right here. I'm going to go ahead and go over here to contacts and I'm going to go to my last record we have in the system right now. We've got John Coltrane, I think it's a sample record that we have somewhere I'm also going to log into say Mumbai India just for fun. It's the farthest connection that we have. And what we're going to do is we're going to make an edit in this database and you're going to see that sync in real time. Now we are connecting to Mumbai the spinning that you see right now is a function of us going from 30 milliseconds for a local server to 300 milliseconds which is 10 times slower, right? Or a thousand percent worse if you want to say it that way it's a much longer process to spin this up which is why you don't want people trying to access a server that's continents away thousands of miles away it's just not good business.
Let me go ahead and hide myself right here. I'm going to go ahead and make some edits over here. I'm going to say this gentleman's number is 0 1 5 5 5 1 2 1 2. I'm going to go ahead and tab down to the next item we're going to say he has some additional information here. And I can come down here and even put in email which could be uh you know supportmusic.com. And when I click out of course it saves or commits the data and then after a short period of time that data will replicate forward you'll be pushed to the server in India and then of course FileMaker server will update our record here. And of course you see that right there it's a little bit longer than five seconds but we pick the slowest possible sequence to move that data all the way to India and have it move itself all the way back. Really Really cool technology! And so I'm going to go ahead and do a container update real quick I'm going to grab a picture of john here once again sample data I'm going to put it over here it's going to drag and drop and post to Mumbai India first, so there's a container right there of information I can zoom in a little bit. If I click out I can confirm it's being saved and updated.
And at some point here shortly the synchronization process will move this image all the way across the world not just to my West Coast server but also the East Coast server the Ireland server and the Australian server as well. It's really really great! Let's try the scenario where we have conflicting information I thought this was one of the best demos I saw say for example that we're going to we misspelled this person's name. I'm going to come over here and say that this is John Coaltrain misspelling there and then uh over here this record in this system I'm gonna go ahead and specify that this person does have a website is www. music.com so we actually have two actually almost conflicting bits of data right here. And so the idea is to kind of commit both of them and to see what happens. So I'm going to click out over here I'm going to click out over here this is simulating of course two different users on two different continents on two different replicated servers editing the same record at the same time so what happens?
And so what you saw is that this edit was pushed over here because this is the updated information and then on the flip side of that we actually had the website information here input in Northern California pushed to Mumbai. Now once again it went to Mumbai pretty quickly and then Mumbai had to send it back to me again round robin trip here in California. So this is pretty amazing technology.
So that's a short summary of the FileMaker to the enterprise livestream events that we did in July. Once again thanks to the folks at 360works for making great software that allows for replication of data around the world. And basically near real time you see all the edits within about five to ten seconds worldwide. Keep in mind that each of these servers support over 100 users each. In fact theoretically they're rated up to 500 users each so we could have had 2500 users accessing this system at the same time making edits with that data being replicated in the background. Now of course the synchronization software is part of it the other part of this is FM Starting Point which is our free FileMaker CRM. It's completely unlocked and not only that it's explicitly designed for high performance in mind. In fact the folks at 360works even did an audit to verify it was high speed because they wanted to make sure that it represented their product as well as possible. So they did a review on FM Starting Point and between their efforts and the efforts of my team we have a new version of starting point called FM Starting Point Enterprise. And it's specifically tuned to work with mirror sync. It's a great way of starting a project FM Starting Point is free and definitely check out the mirror-sync software at 360works.com.
I'm Richard Carlton and I'll catch you in the next video.
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