Tuesday, May 28, 2024

Vodafone & Xyna, new community manager, improved thread management

Xyna Bulletin #11

Dear customers, partners and friends,

Since we were able to officially name Deutsche Telekom as a reference customer and partner for Xyna.com Professional last June, we have already reported on our collaboration from time to time in the Bulletin. But there are also other big Xyna users! Today we have a very nice statement from Vodafone.

And there's news in the Xyna team: our colleague Simon Franz is taking on the role of Community Manager - and will therefore be the central point of contact for all topics relating to Xyna Open Source, GitHub and Xyna.com Professional. Simon has also brought great news from product development: a stabilization measure in the area of Java Thread Management - sounds latently exotic, but is technically absolutely sound and a necessity for the runtime stability of the Xyna Factory.

Have fun reading!

Best regards from Mainz,
(Helau!)
Alexander & Philipp

LinkedIn
Xyna GmbH
Dr. Alexander Ebbes / Philipp Dominitzki

PS: Do you know colleagues who are also interested in Xyna? Then please pass it on! A short answer with contact details to bulletin@xyna.com is enough. However, if you are not interested, a short email will suffice and we will remove you from the mailing list.

Xyna & Vodafone

For those who have not known us and our history for so long: Arcor or rather DBKom (which then became CNI, then Arcor, then Vodafone) was once our first telco customer.

That was in 1997! To give you an idea: today we are already (long since) receiving applications from graduates who were born at the end of the 90s 🥶

Our partnership with Vodafone has thus existed for an almost infinitely long time, which makes us proud and grateful. At the first Xyna conference in 2006, Armin Lotz reported on the beginnings of the collaboration, from the first IP address database to the OSS suite of AIDA systems:

In a fast-moving and volatile age, such relationships are particularly valuable. They make it possible to implement sustainable, value-creating solutions that are constantly being renewed and modernized, thus becoming stable building blocks of future-oriented architecture.

To mark the 27th anniversary* of our business relationship, Steffen Krippner left us a beautiful statement:

We have been relying on our partner GIP Exyr GmbH for the development of OSS applications for over two decades. The AIDA provisioning suite, which provides IP services for private customers, business customers and carriers, is based on the Xyna Factory automation platform.

GIP Exyr GmbH provides competence and expertise at the demanding interface between network engineering, automation and software/IT. Together, we are shaping the future of network automation at Vodafone - in line with our credo: Growing Together.
Steffen Krippner Head of OSS Fulfilment Vodafone GmbH

Many thanks to Steffen for this statement and, of course, to the entire team at Vodafone. We look forward to hopefully many more years of our successful partnership!

* The 27th wedding anniversary is the mahogany wedding anniversary: mahogany wood is rare, precious and particularly hard and durable. In many ways, this fits very well!

New Xyna Community Manager: Simon Franz

If you visit the Xyna community on GitHub, you will notice that our repositories are actively used, updated and further developed there:

Our Community Management team is also responsible for moderating discussions in the forum, editing content in the Doku Wiki and, of course, processing issues and pull requests.

And with Simon Franz, this community management now has a new face:

„Hello everyone, I'm Simon Franz, I've been with GIP since June 2021 and from now on I'm also publicly the new Xyna Community Manager.

My computer science degree in Düsseldorf not only taught me the technical and theoretical aspects, but I was also able to make a difference for my fellow students through my social work at university. And I think I will be able to use this skill here as well as my ability to quickly take on unknown problems, which also helps me in my private life in improvisational theater.

I am excited about the new challenges that I and my team will face and look forward to the further development of Xyna.“

Simon is of course not alone, the Xyna product development team consists of a number of experts for architecture, backend, operations and frontend. Simon's particular task is to stay in contact with Xyna's friends and users, to take up suggestions and to steer the genesis of Xyna in such a way that it is geared towards the current and future requirements of users.

Feel free to contact Simon - he is looking forward to the exchange!

Improved thread management

The latest update of Xyna fixes a problem that only occurred in rare cases, but could have relevant effects.

In earlier versions of Xyna, threads (i.e. elementary execution units) were rarely caught in an out-of-memory situation. For example, due to large inputs from external jobs that were processed in nested loops. To manage such exceptions, there was already a buffer mechanism that helped in many cases. In special constellations, however, when such threads took up a particularly large amount of memory, the buffer was not sufficient and there was a risk that system stability would be impaired by high resource consumption. Some threads could be restarted manually in such situations, but most were terminated after the error.

With the revised and newly introduced functions for thread management from the upcoming Xyna version 9.0.5, this restart process has not only been automated and thus made more convenient for the user, but the reuse of the buffer means that the crashing of a thread can be better prevented overall.

In summary, the special release not only brings a more stable factory, but also one that can repair itself at this point. Win-win!

If you would like to know more, please contact us at any time or send us an e-mail.