We have some information and good news to share about incoming release.
First and foremost, several clients and potential customers asked us how do we charge for multiple servers.
Green Screens Servers multiple instances are available only for redundancy purposes and only for customers under the maintenance contract. Number of instances are not limited, customers can run as many instances required without additional charge. Green Screens Servers are licensed per workstation use regardless of how many instances will run in parallel.
While using multiple Green Screens servers instances running behind a load balancer, we are relying to third party products (such as Syncthing) for data synchronization.
For example, when using MFA, when user want to register OTP, or Biometric token, load balancer will redirect all request to a single Green Screens Server instance, still data needs to be updated to other instances in the background. And this is where Syncthing helps.
We made an integration and auto-discovery with mentioned Syncthing - however, that has one drawback. It is not supported on every platform (including IBM i) where Green Screens can be installed limiting OS choice mostly to Linux and MS Windows when using multi instance setting.
With the incoming release, we will introduce a new Java based engine integrated into Green Screens itself. Without need for extra software.
Technology behind is P2P (point-to-point protocol) and DHT (distributed-hash-tables). It is common for cloud based storage or for chat applications such as Signal, WhatsApp and other...
Such products usually requires external Cloud based service, which is not the case with Green Screens Server. New sync engine will be integral part of the Green Screens product, configuration and overall maintenance will be significantly easier without any 3rd aprty dependency for either external tools or cloud services.
New service will be available to all customers under GSv5 or newer, and might be backported to GSv4 for customers under the maintenance contract.
Planned release for GSv5 is mid December 2024. , other versions will follow within few weeks.