Tsahi Levent-Levi, also known as BlogGeek.me, has established himself as one of the most prominent WebRTC analysts. He has been covering the industry for the past decade, while also training WebRTC professionals and co-running the testRTC business. Before his career as an expert analyst, Levent-Levi spent many years working directly with companies like Amdocs and Radvision.

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The best thing about SaaS? There’s a single version for EVERYONE!

Once released, all of your users are upgraded automatically and magically to the latest (and only) version available. It is great, especially if you’re dealing with security patches, optimizations, and even cool new features you’d like your users to enjoy.

The most problematic thing about SaaS? There’s a single version. For everyone.

Sometimes, one-size-fits-all isn’t a perfect fit. Taking it to the domain of CPaaS and video APIs, if you are using an SDK of a CPaaS vendor, then you are “in charge” and “in control” of the SDK version. You can decide how and when to upgrade the SDK (up to a point where the one you’re using stops working well). That said, the backend infrastructure of that SDK is going to run the latest and greatest. That one and only release that got pushed to production today.

If you go to lowcode/nocode solutions, then you have an even bigger problem: With the single version, how would you as a business relying on that SaaS vendor be able to prepare for the coming change? Wake up one morning, and there’s a new button or menu item in that app of yours. One which even your support isn’t aware of, but your end users are already asking about.

Why am I telling you all this? Because of the new release pinning feature in JaaS.

If you are running Jitsi as a Service, and you’d like to maintain and control the user experience and feature set, then you can just go to the admin dashboard and pin the release that is currently running:

Screenshot of Jitsi release webpage

What will happen at this point, is that everything related to this release—and I mean everything—will get pinned. From the UI your users see, to all of the backend Jitsi server infrastructure.

Once you pin a release, it will stay there for you for at least three months. During that time, you will be able to prepare to upgrade to the latest release. While JaaS is running multiple versions now, you will be able to use two of them in parallel: the one you pinned and the latest one, which will require a special flag in your embed code to run.

This allows you to conduct tests on the latest release or even roll it out slowly to a larger and larger percentage of your users.

JaaS will handle all the headaches of maintaining these releases, figuring out which resources are necessary, etc.

And you? You’ll be able to enjoy both worlds: use JaaS while pinning a specific release and having a clear and easy migration path to the latest one at all times.

To learn more about the JaaS pinning feature, click here. 8x8 Jitsi as a Service is an enterprise-ready video meeting platform that allows developers, organizations and businesses to easily build and deploy video solutions. To find out more about 8x8 Jitsi as a service visit jaas.8x8.vc