Changelog

🎉 A new permission system released

• Gives Administrator a precise way to manage users access to Files, Workstations and Organization Management

• Manage access to general and specific permissions (see an example below for instances)
• Manage all general permissions in the Directory tab:

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🖥️ General Availability of Reemo Streaming

• New users will automatically use Reemo as their default protocol, allowing them to have a 100% web-based experience
• Complete with Webcam, Microphone, Multi-Screen, Gamepad and Drawing tablet support

Improvements

• Add an email checker when user are inviting others to their organization
• Workstation Groups are now more reliable when starting
• Add new regions in our custom region selector
• Add an IPv4 and v6 checker when user updates their security rules

Fixes

• Fix a bug that would cause issues when resizing a reemo streaming session
• Fix a bug allowing users to have a 0min0sec timeout on their workstation
• Fix a display issue with snapshotting workstations
• Fix a bug that would lead our file streaming logs to eat the entire available disk space
• Fix a bug that would not let users access their workstation after a combination of payment failure and success
• Fix a bug that would allow users to stop a starting workstation

🌐 New region available for Asia/Middle East location

Not that much to say for this sprint, but one exciting news for people located in Taiwan, India or Bahrain:

It's now possible to create NVIDIA and General purpose workstation in Hong Kong, Mumbai and Bahrain !

For that, you just have to go to the creation workstation page, and select one of these location in the list !

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📁 Users can now create and share file systems!

Use them like you would use and share Google Drive folders.

With one difference. Those file system are automatically mounted on any workstation you connect to 😀

🚀 Improvements

• All organization now have access to a default share drive: OrganizationCloudFiles !
• Reemo users can now use their webcam and their microphone

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🐞Fixes

• Fix the Flaneer logo in our sign up email
• Fix a bug that would cause the duplication of the OrganizationCloudFiles at workspace creation
• User can’t revoke their own admin rights anymore

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✨ A new permission system

• Completed the design and the ground work for the new permissions system. Which would soon be available to all users to easily manage access of various resources across the application.Implemented a new permission system for application resources. We removed our previous system of authorized groups and users, and switch to a more complete permission system. Select a resource (an entire division, a particular workstation, etc), and decide who can do what!

• We implemented a new File System. User’s can now create Drives, choose who can access them, populate them with the assets they need, and they will be automatically mounted on user’s workstations. It now takes only a minute to give the right team access to the right assets, and another minute to let them work with those on their Flaneer workstations!

💎 Improvements

• Improved streaming user experience over the browser. Added multiple configuration options to support low end connections at variable frame rates. This allows users to decide how they want their machine streaming quality

• Newsbridge users will now be able to open a workstation directly on the right Premiere Pro project!

🐞 Fixes

• Fix a bug that would cause user retrying their payment to not have access to their machines
• Improve our API listing available workstations

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📶 Tom’s Streaming journey

Sadly Tom was out of office those last 2 weeks !

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✨ A new permission system

• Completed the design and the ground work for the new permissions system. Which would soon be available to all users to easily manage access of various resources across the application.

💎 Improvements

• Personas in our create workstation page are now up to date with our latest Images!

• Workstations permissions are now more tailored for each of our users!
• Organization cloud files can now be mount on any Windows Drive Letter
• An email is now sent when our queue system succeeds in creating a workstation
• Our backend function listing a user workstation is now faster and more reliable

🐞 Fixes

• Fixed an issue with bulk reads and writes, preventing some users to be able to view the users in their organization.
• Fixed an issue with our automatic retry queue system to launch workstations
• Fixed the loader when people sign in with Microsoft SSO
• Fixed some of our workstation type : welcome G5 and bye bye C5 !

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📶 Tom’s Streaming journey

Very exciting post today! We can show a very early streaming test we have done recently.

There are obviously a lot of issues to iron out here, but it shows that the video streaming pipeline is up and running and ready to be improved upon.

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✨ What's new ?

🎉  Users can now signup and login with Microsoft accounts

Microsoft can now be used to sign up/in, using the new invitation template or the old one

🖥️  Instance Type Update

Users can now update Instance Type of their persistent workstations in the workstation setting menu.

This lets you switch from a small machine to a high powered one with multiple GPUs in minutes !

💎 Improvements

• Users encountering Insufficient Capacity issues during there Workstation startup had to try again and again manually. This job is now automatic
• Windows is now properly turned off when a user stops a workstation
• The workstation creation page now offers personas instead of templates
• Users now have access to G5 workstations
• Business customers can now fill in their VAT ID at checkout time
• Users can now rename the mount letter of their cloud files
• Users can now access an up to date documentation here

🐞 Fixes

• Fix an issue where users could request a workstation in region where they were not available
• Fix an issue where workstation’s display name where used for security identifications

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Tom’s Streaming journey

This sprint I finally got to start implementing full video encoding and decoding, up until now we have only been sending key frames, whereas now we are sending key frames and predicted frames.

What does all that mean?

When we compress video, unlike images, we can use previous frames to determine what the next frame will look like. For Flaneer that means that only the bits of your desktop that have changed need to be sent. This can massively reduce the size of the frames being sent, take a look at this for example:

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The first frame is over 10 times as large. For us, that means we can deliver the same high quality streaming experience in fewer pixels than before!

There is still work to be done before we can show anything major, but here is a sneak preview showing how better compressed video will send the same image in fewer bytes and fewer packets:

💡Fixed IP

You can now attach a fix IP to your Workstation! Using a VPN, a proxy, accessing data or software that needs to authorise your IP: we got you covered. It now takes 10 seconds to attach an IP you will keep for life!

🌟 Improvements

• Our default templates are brand new: new Windows version, new streaming protocol, new softwares!
• Our documentation is now up to date with our latest improvements. Visit them here!
• Workstation’s IP address are now shown in their toolbar
• Users can now select their region in the /create-workstation page!

• We now uses less CPU to send analytics from the user’s workstation to our servers.
• Users can now update their instance type on the fly !

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed bugs related to the way we compute user’s idle time. We also set the new default idem timeout to 30minutes. This timeout is now block to 2hours max.
• Fixed bugs to would consider user streaming on the browser as always active.
• Fixed a bug to would cause the reset password function to fill a fake code.
• Fixed a bug to would cause our full screen toggle to work poorly (or not at all on Safari).
• Fixed a bug that would cause downloaded folders from the web-app to be empty.

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💡Workstation Creation Flow

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We made the workstation flow much faster, cleaner and overall easier to use. Say bye to our ugly modal we’ve had for the last year, say hello to a 2-steps flow.

Start by choosing the software you use the most:

• Game Developper (Unity, Unreal, Visual Studio, etc)
• Video Editor (Premiere Pro, Photoshop, etc)
• …

and the select the specs you need. Start using your tailored machine in less than a minute. You need something else? That machine is automatically set-up in the closest server possible!

🌟 Improvements

• Refund of 95% of workstation subscription if deleted less than 24h after first subscription

• Easier way to turn on workstations

• Billing and Help pages now open in a new tab

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed a bug where adding a group to the workspace would empty the users
• Fixed bugs with deleting a group and the group would not be removed from authorised groups of the workstation
• Fixed a bug where creating a payment method before a workstation would result in a failure
• Fixed a bug where users would not see the right tax collection amount during checkout
• Fixed a bug where our Load Balancing System would fail during workstation deletion
• Fixed a bug where Storage Size could be not compatible during workstation creation
• Fixed a bug where reset password would fail
• Fixed a bug where creating a Workstation would fail because of internal tags
• Fixed a bug where deleting a workstation ,that not paid, before 24h would fail

📖 Tom’s Streaming journey

Most of this sprint for me was spent at MIFA, however I did get some time to implement a simple Ack system:

Acks (acknowledgements) are sent in response to a packet arriving to let the sender know that their packet arrived. These are a part of the TCP protocol, however we are using UDP. We still want the acks, but we don’t want to wait like TCP does. This will let us determine in future what our packet loss is and allow us to react in real time to changing network conditions.

Since UDP is an unreliable transport, we need to pack in some redundancy. We don’t want to waste data, so we are going to pack 32 boolean values into a single 32-bit integer using the binary. Each ack will then contain the packet it is acknowledging and a record of whether the last 32 values have been received. That was if our ack gets lost, there are 32 more chances it will be recorded.

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💡Single Sign-On

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We unveiled the new sign up process 2 weeks ago, and we keep going in the same direction: simplicity and rapidity. Organizations can now enable Azure Directory SSO with Flaneer, invite their members and synchronise groups and permissions with their Flaneer instances. You can now directly enable Azure directory groups for specific type of machines or environments!

With the same mindset, we are now implementing Google and Microsoft SSO and they will soon be available. New users will now be able to directly sign-up with those accounts!

🌟 Improvements

• User creating a new workstation gets added in the list of authorised users
• Workstation groups now shut downs quicker
• Workstation groups are now reaching a 99% launch reliability
• The web streaming tab will now display the name of the workstation

• The workstation deletion will now ask to type the name of the workstation to confirm the deletion, to avoid deleting workstation without wanting it
• It is now possible to rename a workstation after creating it

🐛 Fixes

• User signing-up now gets a default first name, last name and organisation name
• Fix a bug with group’s name preview when adding new users
• Fix a bug that would block some users to access their workstation even after a successful payment
• Fix Streaming Protocol issues related to our best performances settings
• Fix the way we delete users on Flaneer
• Fix a bug with our “Turn off workstation” button on the Streaming toolbar

📖 Tom’s Streaming journey

Heard of the Platinum Jubilee?

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💡New sign-up process

We reduced the number of steps to create a Flaneer account, and its now the fastest it can be. (until we implement Google SSO of course). You can now create your virtual PC in less than a minute. We are also working on our new Workstation creation flow. No more tedious modal or hard to read dropdown: everything is available in one place.

Say hello to your blazing fast new PC.

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🌟 Improvements

• New users now get a default name and organization name
• Every organization can now use Windows Server 2022 templates in their library
• We improved the “Add To Group“ dropDown modal

• Improve Work Station Groups instances warming to reduce session start failures

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed an issue with the macOS shortcut for the Mouse - Gaming mode feature
• Fixed an issue that would set Persistent Workstation’s timeout to NaN
• Add a Lock mechanism to solve issues with concurrent new session’s requests

📖 Tom’s Streaming journey

Logging!

When we are beginning to look at the performance of our video streaming solution, the temptation is to get stuck right in and start ripping the guts out. However, a wise move is to take a step back and start to look at how we are going to perform our measurements. We need a robust and easy to read logging output.

We chose to leverage https://spectreconsole.net/ for pretty ✨ looking logs. That isn’t just a vanity thing, colours and emojis can help encode lots of information in a smaller space.

Not only is logging to the console important, but being able to observe important statistics as you work. As such, we can now log directly to the window title with an easy API:

That FPS is looking a little low 👀…. back to work!

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