I should begin by apologizing for our lack of blog updates over the last few months! We're sorry, LemonStand Now is a huge priority of ours right now and we get so caught up in development that we forget about this blog. I promise we'll be better moving forward.

The last two months have been an exciting time for LemonStand Now, some big changes, more lines of code than you can shake a stick at, and enough testing to make any sane person go slightly crazy. There is one change however, that is bigger than all other combined: we migrated to a new primary provider, Amazon. I could write several blog posts about why we've changed and I may touch on infrastructure planning, requirements and forecasting more if anyone is interested. The short of it is Amazon is a better choice for us to bring you a cloud based e-commerce platform that is fast, secure and reliable.

Thankfully it's been a easy switch as we ensured early on that we built a platform that was as host agnostic as possible. There were some critical changes that have been made, notably the removal of the router from our stack. We gained a huge boost in speed with this change, directly routing requests on our shared platform was something we really wanted early on but wasn't possible, it's now possible on Amazon and we're thrilled with the performance so far. There are countless other changes that we've made with respect to the Amazon migration (and we'll detail them in future blog posts), and we're excited at the possibilities that their wide breadth of services opens up.

We've also introduced a new tool into our stack to further automate management tasks and to allow for better provisioning, Chef. We've deployed the open source version in our pre-production environment and we've seen a solid 10% increase in provisioning efficiency. Chef also allows us to remove some of the overhead on our manager which originally handled provisioning using a custom service and scripts we developed, this change should allow us to reduce the amount of manager slave instances we need to run as we grow. Three cheers for lower operating costs!

Hopefully that gives you some insight into what's been going on here, and if there's specifics that you'd like to know about, please let us know in the comments and we'll try to put together a post covering them!

There is one last thing we'd like to announce, our Development Roadmap is now live, it's updated in real-time so check back often to see what we're currently working on as we get ready to launch the first phase of our beta!

You may have noticed that we've taken down the Beta & Newsletter sign-up forms, this is temporary as we add a few new features to support late stage phases of our closed beta. On that note we wanted to go over how our beta phases will work so folks can get an idea of what to expect.

Our goal with the beta is to collect a few different types of data, primarily we're looking for real-world performance data, we can simulate and run tests against our dev grid all day, but real world data is needed to truly fine tune our grid and service(s). In addition to that, we're really excited to get user feedback on different aspects of LemonStand Now, performance, UI and your experiences developing within Now are some areas we're hoping to collect a large amount of feedback to ensure that we're building a platform that you're going to love and enjoy as much as you've come to love LemonStand itself.

That being said, we'd have to run a very long (and expensive) beta to effectively collect all that data if we gave our testers access to everything all at once, so instead we'll be rolling out the beta in three stages. There is the potential for a fourth if feedback warrants drastic changes to something in the scope of our phases.

Phase One consists primarily of low level platform testing. You'll be given a prebuilt LemonStand instance to experiment with. Tailr, scaling, grid features and other higher level Now features may be visible in your CP, but will not be active. With this first phase of testing we're looking to collect performance data and feedback. In addition, there's a core piece of our framework that will be given it's first real-world test outside of our dev environment, our Router stack, which directs external requests to our grid.

Phase Two is where things start to get exciting, we'll be rolling out low-level grid scaling, dynamic instances and an additional prebuilt LemonStand option aimed at developers. Unfortunately low-level scaling is as far as scaling in the beta will go, we'd love to be able to let you scale indefinitely, spin up load-balancers and more, but those features are something we'll be saving for our general release as they're cost prohibitive. Feedback is a key concern in this phase, especially surrounding scaling and our developer-aimed prebuilt.

Phase Three, the final planned phase of the beta we'll be rolling out the last of our high level features, one final prebuilt, Tailr and some other high-level functions and features that we'd like to collect data and feedback on. As we move closer towards this phase we will release more details on the features that will be included in the testing.

At the end of phase three, providing we don't run an extended fourth phase to test changes that were needed based on data and feedback during the beta, we'll be allowing beta testers to preserve their sites and bring them into the general release/production environment of LemonStand Now. In addition, beta testers will receive a special beta-testers only pricing package for their participation (More details to be release at a later point in time.).

We hope this gives you a bit of insight into the upcoming beta and it's phases, we wish everyone good luck on being selected! Check back soon for more detailed posts on our data collection process and the tools we'll be using throughout the beta for this task.

Welcome to the new LemonStand Now Development blog!

It's our hope that this blog gives you some insight and involvement in our development process. We're really wanting to bring as much transparency as possible to our development process and get community feedback on features and processes that we introduce into the e-commerce platform that you already know and love.

Over the next few months this blog will serve as your resource for everything related to LemonStand Now. We'll be diving into our development process and explaining some of the unique choices we've made and how we think you're going to love them, in addition to that we'll be announcing some awesome new features and even occasionally throwing up a tutorial or two. Thanks for stopping by, and check back often, as your feedback is valued!