Service outages (in November/December)

Hi-dee-ho, everyone!

Google is turning down the Fusion Tables in the beginning of December. The Gateway Scenery map has been using Fusion Tables for many years as the intermediary service between the rendered map markers and our own database services (because Fusion Tables has provided a magnificent API for filtering just the necessary markers and server-side rendering them on the map) and ... while we have got a alternative solution in place ... that one - hasn't really been tested too much ... not with realistic user amounts at least.

The reason for this is that - we are literally switching from a basically free cloud based service (Google does bill us, but for most of the time, the monthly free credits easily covers the amount of traffic we're getting) onto a system that is running on a single server and ... still tries to do all the server-side rendering that used to be done by a load-balanced datacenter "somewhere". So - we really have not wanted to switch over before it gets absolutely necessary.

What this means ... there most likely will be some service interruptions in early December. Things might be slower than normally - or might not work at all on some times. If this happens (and we hope it will not) please be advised that we will be working on the issue as soon as problems are identified.

But ... as said - we hope there will not be any issues. Because that would be the first time that ever failed to happen ;)

Addendum #1 (Dec 3rd, 2019 @ 21:33Z):

When Google Fusion Tables went offline (pretty much to the minute they said they would) and we switched over to the above mentioned alternate solution ... it seems like things did kinda explode ... on our end o_O

Our alternate solution doesn't seem to be working as well as we were expecting it to. In fact, with the amount of requests, it looks like we are basically serving, for most of the users, error messages at the moment :(

But ... don'tcha worry - our trained team of randomly selected infinite monkeys are currently bashing their keyboards to make this problem be an issue of the past.

Addendum #2 (Dec 4th, 2019 @ 20:12Z):

The above mentioned randomly selected infinite monkeys have managed to get the airport filtering working - at least for the most parts (it looks like filtering out the "ancient"/"included"/"approved" airports doesn't work at the moment).

Also... the monkeys are scratching their fur in search for fleas (or other bugs) trying to find out a way to actually make the markers on the map "clickable". This was quite unexpected that a custom tile overlay behaves differently than the native overlays (though, retrospectively, we should've realized that before) - but no worries, the monkeys are back on their keyboards trying to not only hit the correct keys to those hidden Shakespeare sonnets but also to make this map behave the way it should.

Addendum #3 (Dec 10th, 2019 @ 00:30Z):

The markers are again working as they should and you can view the "renders" of airports. For some reason the "ancient"/"included"/"approved" filtering is still not doing anything, but as soon as the normality gets restored on that axis, things should get back to "business as usual".