Version 1S Product Update

Scout Platform Update - Behind the scenes

 •  4 minutes read

Scout Platform Update - Behind the scenes

Over the last couple months our engineering team has been hard at work rewriting our core infrastructure to vastly improve overall system stability and reduce the potential for outages caused by accelerated growth or third party hosting providers.

As we’ve grown we’ve realized it’s best not to be over-reliant on one particular service provider, availability zone or application, so as such, we combined several of our internal applications into auto-scaling, serverless micro-services that will grow at the same rate we do.

This will allow us to reduce both overhead and the number of potential points of failure that could affect other parts of our services.

For example: rather than running several us-east-1 instances with Rails and PostgreSQL for our authentication systems, and separate Sinatra, MongoDB, Sidekiq and Redis instances for our integrations and core API, we now explicitly use Amazon’s AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB and Simple Queue Service (SQS).

These changes affect all of our applications and will have a direct impact on the speed and reliability of our services moving forward. It will also allow us to quickly add additional integrations, hubs, sensors, and upcoming ZigBee compatibility without worrying about overloading our capacity.

Along with the platform update, we’ve also incorporated several bug fixes and enhancements into our mobile apps. Our Android app now handles mode setup and device pairing natively (rather than through a webview), and our Apple Watch app has been updated for watchOS 2.

Please ensure you are using the latest version of our mobile apps to take advantage of these changes and to continue remotely controlling your Scout security systems.