As part of our effort to make Keboola Connection an open platform we would like to announce the availability of the Keboola Developer Portal - https://apps.keboola.com/. Some of you may already be aware that it is possible to modify applications in KBC through the Developer Portal API. Now we are adding an application to the API so that you can get things done more easily.

The Keboola Developer Portal is a completely separate application from Keboola Connection. It is region-less because it has no access to customer projects. The Developer Portal provides an authoritative list of KBC applications for each region. Each Keboola Connection stack reads this list regularly. As usual in Keboola, the Developer Portal is done in an API first approach, so everything that the application does can be done programmatically too.

What does the Developer Portal do?

• It allows users registered to vendors to create and modify applications in KBC without Keboola Tech support.
• It provides service accounts for automating deployment and testing.
• It provides Docker AWS ECR repositories for applications (thus avoiding Quay and Dockerhub issues).
• It provides an authoritative list of publicly available approved applications.

Anyone can sign up for the Developer Portal. However until you join a vendor or create a new one, you will not be able to do anything. Both creating and joining a vendor must be approved. Joining a vendor must be approved by the vendor administrator, and creating a vendor must be approved by Keboola Tech. Once a member of a vendor, you can modify and add new applications to that vendor. There's no need to fill a checklist and go through our support. When you create an application, it becomes immediately available for you to use. Using the Developer Portal, you can also set up automated deployment for your application.

Keboola Tech still has some things to do:

• approve new vendors
• change some controlled properties of an application (e.g. memory limit)
• approve a new application before it can become public

Next steps:

• We still have a long list of things to be done on the Developer Portal, so we consider it as beta quality at the moment.
• We are soon going to hold a developer meet-up in the Czech Republic where we’d like to hear about your experience developing applications for KBC (in January probably).
• If you have previously used the Developer Portal API, we encourage you to try the application. If you are having trouble joining your vendor, please contact us on support (there may be some friction depending on how your account was created).
• If you have created complex applications using Custom Science, go ahead and check the Developer Portal, it may now be more convenient to turn them into full applications.
• If you have never created an application for Keboola Connection, we highly encourage you to try it - it's much easier now. In fact a component can be created from scratch in an hour.

New Features

• We are pleased to announce a significant speed boost to Snowflake load to workspace (also speeding up Input Mapping inTransformations). For tables with primary keys the speed difference is up to 80%.
• We have also simplified our database extractors, as we mentioned here last week.
• Fixed CSV Import. The component generates meta-data now.

Minor Imporvements

• We have updated our Terms and Conditions.
  Per section 14.3 of our Master Software Subscription Agreement, we would like to notify you of a change to the Agreement and its new version released November 10th. The purpose of this change was to provide further protection to Client Data and to comply with requirements of some third party providers (namely Google). We do not consider this change to be a material change, however we are obliged to provide you with this notification. There is no action required from you in relation to this change if you accept it. We are setting out the original and revised language for your review below. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions or concerns at legal@keboola.com.
  
  Original (version from March 16th, 2016):
  6.7.1. Permitted Use of Client Data. Keboola will only use and will cause all Affiliates and Keboola employees, agents, subcontractors and representatives to only use Client Data for purposes of performing the Services. Keboola shall follow Client instructions when processing Client Data and will not use Client Data other than as authorized by this Agreement. 
  
  Updated (version dated November 10th, 2017):
  6.7.1. Permitted Use of Client Data. Keboola will only use and will cause all Affiliates and Keboola employees, agents, subcontractors and representatives to only use Client Data for purposes of performing the Services. Keboola shall follow Client instructions when processing Client Data and will not use Client Data other than as authorized by this Agreement. Client Data which Keboola downloads (with permission granted by Client during component configuration) from Google, Facebook, Twitter or other third party APIs ("Third Party Data") are stored and handled the same as Client Data under this Agreement. Third Party Data will not be shared anywhere (it remains stored securely on Keboola systems) until Client decides to share that data (for example, by configuring Data writer to Client or third party systems). Client can delete all Third Party Data and data source configurations from Keboola storage anytime. This section shall be read along side with and be subject to the provisions of sections 6.9 (Retention and Deletion) and 6.10 (Compliance with Law) of this Agreement.

We're very pleased to announce the arrival of simplified database extractors.  (Available for MySQL, MSSQL, PGSQL, Redshift, Snowflake, Oracle and IBM DB2)

Configuring the new extractors can not be any easier.  All you need to do is select the tables you want to import and ... that's it! 

Facebook is deprecating Marketing API v2.9 on Monday, November 13, 2017 thus any api call to v2.9 will fail with error.

The latest version is now v2.10.

The migration should only require changing the api-version parameter in all existing configurations of our Facebook Ads Extractor. However, since there may be some breaking changes, we strongly recommend to change the api-version in your configurations manually, review any possible changes and take the appropriate actions.  For more details on the new version, please read Marketing API Changes in v2.10 in the Facebook API Changelog.

Possible breaking change might be renaming of action_link_click_destination breakdown types as follows:

• app_store_clicks => click_to_app_store
• deeplink_clicks => click_to_app_deeplink
• website_clicks => click_to_website

In other Facebook news, they have announced version v2.11 of Facebook Graph API and Facebook Marketing API, for more info read changelog here.

We have been experiencing temporary technical difficulties today since this morning (~ 3:00 AM CET)

Some jobs may have failed as a result.

We're working on resolving the problem and will update here with further information when we have it.

Thank you for your understanding.

Update 14:00 CET, October 22, 2017:  All systems have returned to normal operations and all jobs are now being processed normally.

New Features and Improvements

• Geneea NLP app now supports relations - e.g. My pizza was completely burned. > burn(OBJECT:pizza)
• Redshift transformations input mapping now supports ZSTD compression.
• Improved handling of events search errors

New Applications

GeoIP

GeoIP is latest transformation component power by MaxMind. It helps you to obtain location data from your IP address inputs.

Data Health Application

Data Health Application is an app designed to aid users to produce a clean data file. For more details, please check out Keboola Blog.

Today, September 25, 2017, we experienced jobs failures between 15:11 - 16:15 PM CET. One of our worker servers went down and while launching a new one automatic job restart mechanism didn't seem to work properly and this led to the jobs failures. Everything is working properly now and we will further investigate the cause of the issue. However we recommend to review your orchestrations and take appropriate action if needed. 

We are sorry for any inconvenience.

We are investigating Snowflake partial outage. Queries are now queued.

We will inform about the progress.

UPDATE 11:21 AM PDT Snowflake warehouses are up and running. Queued queries are being processed. We will update the post when we'll have more information about incident cause from Snowflake engineering.

New Features

• Database writers UI  - Disabled tables no longer load the whole content into the container when run and only first row of the table is loaded instead. This saves storage credits and decrease time of jobs run process. It works only for newly disabled tables, so old tables have to be redisabled (enable export -> disable export).
• Python for transformations and custom science applications has been updated to version 3.6.2
  

New Features

• Ability to test component's image against live configurations (Read more in our documentation)
• Markdown descriptions for tables and buckets are now available (see the images bellow)

Fig. 1 Click "Describe the ..." to add description

Fig. 2 Markdown is supported when describing buckets or tables.

Description of buckets and tables can be added/edited in various places:

• In bucket detail (Storage section),
• in table detail (Storage section)
• and anywhere in application where table preview is available

Deprecation

• We finally turned off Legacy Routing (Original status here)
• EOL of the synchronous exports has been announced and we'll turn it off on August 21st, 2017

Tutorials

• Our colleague prepared a small tutorial how to connect to the Keboola provided Snowflake database from Mode Analytics

Fixes

• Due to recent outages of Quay we started migration of our components to AWS ECR
• We updated the Pigeon component to use the newer Storage API client and send files to File Uploads encrypted