Building products for on-premises deployments comes with a set of fairly unique challenges. Most of these center around the onboarding and support process.
Unlike cloud deployments, our engineering team often doesn’t have access to the machines that run on-premises deployments. This means we have to take extra special care in preparing deployments in order to have the correct information available when we need to support our customers (no hot fixing here!). Over the last few weeks, we’ve worked on improving our on-premises operational tools to address these issues.
Improved onboarding
To improve onboarding, we’ve focused on making our installer more robust to varied environments and reducing the number of moving parts in our deployments.
The FOSSA installer now deploys with preflight checks that help us quickly diagnose issues with the deployment environment at installation time. Although we strongly recommend following the prerequisites guidelines for deploying a FOSSA instance, preflight checks add another layer of safety and confidence to the setup process.
In addition, we’ve made a number of database deployment improvements:
- We now provide a containerized Postgres instance for deployment that has the necessary extensions and migrations pre-configured. Customers no longer need to set up and configure a Postgres server in order to install FOSSA.
- We’ve deprecated our custom RubyGems database, so customers have one less database to set up. Our RubyGems support has been rewritten from the ground up to be more robust and performant.
We’ve also added usability improvements that work out-of-the-box. FOSSA now boots with a default admin user so customers can start analyzing their code immediately after installation, without needing to configure any application-level settings.
Improved support
To improve the support experience, we’ve been working on making it easy for customers to gather information for support requests.
With this update, FOSSA can now generate support bundles for quickly diagnosing on-premises issues. Support bundles are collections of metrics, telemetry, and logging that help our support engineers troubleshoot problems with instances of FOSSA. We’ve built support bundles based off of hard-earned experience from resolving FOSSA issues across a multitude of environments. With automated bundle generation, we expect to reduce the amount of time it takes for our engineers to resolve on-premises deployment issues.
Improved integrations
To support more customers’ workflows, we’re constantly adding new integrations to the FOSSA ecosystem.
In this update, we’re adding GitLab Enterprise support in addition to our existing support for GitHub Enterprise and BitBucket Server. Check out our quickstart documentation for setup details.
Bug fixes all around
Newer on-premises customers should also see various other miscellaneous improvements:
- We fixed a major bug in our Git integration related to TLS/SSL connections. This should reduce the number of components that previously failed to build due to connection issues.
- BitBucket Server authentication now works much more smoothly than before.
- Our recent upgrade to Node 8 LTS should improve performance for most workloads by about 20%.
- …and many more!
TL;DR
On-premises deployments are getting an upgrade in 3 areas:
- Better onboarding and installation process.
- Smoother support process.
- More enterprise integrations.
Interested in these upgrades? Shoot us an email at support@fossa.com.
Questions?
Suggestions on how we can improve your workflow? Let us know at support@fossa.com.
More on FOSSA
FOSSA helps team stay on top of their open source code. 85% of your code today is from open source dependencies, each with their own licensing terms. We help teams reduce risk without slowing down development by integrating automated license compliance scanning with your CI/CD workflow.
If you’d like to try FOSSA in the cloud today or learn more about our on-prem solution, contact support@fossa.com with a bit of detail about your company’s goals.
FOSSA was built by the team behind TLDRLegal and is working with some great lawyers like Heather Meeker (author of MPL and Mozilla ToS).
