Thriftly v2.2: Free-forever deployment, API metrics, gRPC support

Several new features are coming your way that will make it easier to get started with Thriftly, monitor performance of your APIs, and have access to high performance protocols. Here’s what you need to know about today’s release:

New Thriftly trial licensing

Most importantly, this new release made changes to both the Thriftly Developer and Thriftly Deployment downloads, which makes it even easier for you to get started. 

Thriftly Developer

The Developer download continues to be free forever, but now you no longer have to re-register your installation every six months. This version provides everything you need to launch and access a basic Thriftly Service, created from your legacy application.

Thriftly Deployment

The Deployment download is now also free forever, but the number of application pools and processes you can deploy with a trial license is limited. Trial licenses also now contain a data transfer limit.

With free-forever, you get:

• One API endpoint
• A single application pool with two processes
• The ability to make one API call per second, with a surge capability of five calls per second. If you exhaust the surge capability, you'll have to wait five seconds to make your next call
• An up-to-32 KB limit on requests and responses
  
  

Note: if you’re using a previous trial version, you’ll be prompted to reconcile your deployment with these new restrictions after you update and launch Thriftly Deployment.

If you’re an independent developer, working on small one-off projects, you should be able to use this version of Thriftly Deployment forever, without ever purchasing a Thriftly subscription. No strings attached - this rate-limited version will be available as long as you choose to use it.

What if your business expands? As your projects grow in scope, you’ll eventually want to purchase a subscription - so you can make more calls, create more endpoints, and pass more data.

For larger software vendors or systems integrators, the rate-limited Deployment trial offers a great way to sample Thriftly, as well as the services you create from it, without spending any money. Then, after you've established a proof of concept, you can purchase the subscription(s) you need from the Thriftly portal.

Thriftly now supports gRPC protocol

The gRPC framework provides a high performance, scalable, multi-language call format - making it a powerful protocol for microservices.

The structure of gRPC is lean, with the processing occurring at the marshaling and unmarshaling stage, so it requires little in the way of additional processing and modulation. As a result, the protocol is inherently efficient.

Additionally, because gRPC is built upon Protocol Buffers (also known as protobufs), and designed to be a lightweight approach, it allows communication and data storage to be predictable and parseable.

Monitor your key API metrics

As you increase your reliance on internally created APIs, one area that you’ll eventually need to turn your focus to is the collection and analysis of metrics related to the performance of your API. This time series data can prove valuable for many reasons, serving as a debugging tool, an optimization tool, a monitoring system, an alert manager, and more.

To make integration with industry standard software as simple as possible, Thriftly now includes a Prometheus scrape which allows you to access a wide variety of details about your Thriftly-based API. By pairing this Prometheus scrape with Grafana, you can easily create rich interactive dashboards to visualize your API’s performance lifecycle.

An example of a Thriftly monitoring dashboard, made with Grafana

If you’re as excited as us about the possibilities of gRPC, monitoring API metrics, and free forever deployment, you can get started with Thriftly right here, or watch a webinar recording of Thriftly 2.2 release + measuring API metrics that matter: