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Oct 1, 2017 — Improved activation, SPDY discontinuation, and other PAPI updates

about 7 years ago by igkoprow@akamai.com

​Akamai​'s introducing capabilities for customers to go even faster when deploying changes on the edge network, and to roll back changes in necessary.

Improved property activation process:

Today our activation times are ~10 minutes. To make this possible, we use a phased approach to propagate your property’s configuration changes through the network to ensure complete safety and reliability.

However, we want to encourage you to go EVEN faster by displaying intermediate milestone within this process to you! First, we prioritize deploying your changes on the portion of our network serving your traffic so you can start validating changes within minutes after you begin activation. As you continue your work, we continue to work too - in the background deploying your change over our entire network, and then running our safety checks. If we detect a problem that could impact your site, we’ll automatically cancel the activation and let you know.

Our enhanced tracking bar shows each stage of the process. This provides you the benefit of monitoring our background tasks while going about your workflows based on your preferences.

Activation Stages (NEW)

Stage 1 (Live): Deploying the property version to our edge servers currently serving your traffic. After this stage is complete, you can begin testing and validating your changes right away.

Stage 2 (Fully Deployed): Completing deployment to our network. After this stage, your updates are now on our entire global network (you can continue testing and validating your changes)

Stage 3 (Completed): Performing safety checks on this property version to ensure your updates are successful before completing the activation. If we detect a problem, the property automatically rolls back to the last active version in minutes.

You can leverage all activation stages via the UI and PAPI.

Fast Fallback (NEW)

We recognize your need to continuously test and validate multiple changes in your environment quickly. After an activation is complete, you have a one-hour window to revert (fall back) the configuration to your last (most recent) active property version in ~1 minute. Fast Fallback is available both the UI and PAPI.

See Property Manager API for documentation.

Miscellaneous Property Manager API (PAPI) improvements:

We are releasing several important improvements to the Property Manager API (PAPI), including:

  • For better control around activations, PAPI now supports fast fallback and early validation (see separate release notes for details). Furthermore, fast activation (~2 minutes on staging and ~10 minutes on production) has recently been made available to all customers, and is the default for all configuration changes unless you’re adding or removing hostnames.

  • Resource prefixes (prp_1234, ctr_5678 etc) are now optional, making it easier to build applications across PAPI and other Akamai APIs.

  • groupId and contractId query parameters are now optional for most PAPI endpoints.

  • Search endpoint now includes the latest property version that was saved, not only the versions active on staging or production. This means you can find properties (by property name, hostnames and edge hostnames) that have not yet been activated.

  • Validate only option. You can now submit a new config rule tree for validation without creating a new property version.

  • Rule format v2017–06–19 was released a few months ago and has the most up-to-date list of Property Manager features. If you are not already using a fixed rule format, you should do so to prevent feature changes from breaking your code. See the PAPI documentation on how to Freeze a Rule Tree’s Feature Set for more details. We intend to release a new rule format roughly every six months.

  • All improvements are fully backwards compatible, so the PAPI version number stays on v1.

See Property Manager API for further details.

SPDY options removed from Property Manager:

SPDY was deprecated on March 15, 2017. The SPDY behavior has been removed from the Property Manager catalog.