Heya friend!

Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building.

INTRO

Looks like we're on more of a monthly cadence still 😅

This is going to be a shorter update. October was busy, but I can't talk about it yet. I'll have a longer report after CloudFest USA.

Because I was so busy with other things, I didn't get to work on Ymir itself much. That said, I did some really good marketing at WordCamp Canada! 💪

I was pretty exhausted last week because I was talking non-stop for three days. It takes a while for me to recover, but I have to be in shape for CloudFest USA next week. (I am officially going!) So I've been resting a lot.

There was also the AWS outage last Monday too. It didn't affect Ymir too much, luckily. I'll talk a bit more about it.

On the business side, everything is unchanged. No new customers or churn.

PRODUCT

You can always view the history of Ymir's product development at https://ymirapp.com/changelog.

So the AWS outage last week was interesting. The Ymir platform had some issues because it's on us-east-1. (I might move to ca-central-1 when I migrate from Vapor.) The platform also had issues because EC2 was not letting you create instances. This broke bastion hosts.

SQS had some delays in processing things. Instant commands weren't running instantly. But they ran eventually.

That said, already deployed sites worked fine. So I didn't really see issues with those. My blog had zero downtime that I could see. None of my customers in us-east-1 saw issues either.

The last us-east-1 outage two years ago affected deployed sites, but not this one. That's the tricky thing with these outages. They fail in ways that can have no visible impact. It depends on your cloud architecture and what the underlying service issue really is.

On the product front, there's a lot of stuff in the backlog like the CLI refactor. I'm glad I'm not doing much for the next five months or so. I hope to get through a lot of that backlog and launch Laravel support.

MARKETING

It's hard to state how well WordCamp Canada went. (You can find the slides here.) I had a 9am slot on the last day, and the room was full. 🤯 CarlBoard also made an appearance! 🤣

The talk went so well I couldn't finish in time. 😅 I had so many great questions that we just ran out of time. (We ended before the case studies.) But that's a great problem to have IMHO. I love when attendees are so engaged!

This talk was also my opportunity to test some of the marketing language for the Ymir rebrand. The language resonated a lot better than what I was doing before. That's another great sign for me!

I'm really happy the talk went that well because I'm giving it again at CloudFest USA next week! That's part of the reason I'm going. I'll be tweaking the talk a bit to fit the business focus of CloudFest, but it'll be 90% the same.

I'll also be there to talk about Ymir. Based on my conversations at WordCamp Canada, I think it'll be interesting. I had some serious interest/questions about the platform from both Acquia (Drupal) and Upsun (formerly platform.sh) which is really exciting for me.

BUSINESS

You can always view Ymir's up-to-date business metrics at ymirapp.com/open. They're updated every 10 minutes.

Nothing much to talk about in this report. But be on the lookout for the next one 😉

Carl