LAIKA 4 is coming

In the end of the last year we introduced LAIKA 3. It was a big release for our customers and it improved the platform a lot. In this update we migrated to the latest technological stack and improved performance of the whole solution.

Today we are ready to announce the next step of the platform evolution: LAIKA 4. And we also ready to provide you some insights regarding the improvements that was included into this release.

LAIKA 4 is a next-step of a LAIKA platform to provide our customers with best-in-class metadata management capabilities. As you may know LAIKA was designed to store large amount of data, especially when we are talking about the product data. From the storage point of view there is no any limitations: you could store as many data as you want and there is no need to configure something beforehand. You could combine different types of the product data inside the same product object and then supply this data to different channels or UIs, but operate it and store it as a single entity. At the same time on the UI side configuration of the product metadata model was not a simple thing especially if you have large amount of metadata fields or complex taxonomy or tricky use-cases. For sure, it was possible to configure almost any case with different types of fields, sections, permissions, channels, locales and even units of measure. And it was stored as a JSON setting that could be configured automatically. But if we are talking about really large number of metadata fields (for example, you want to configure 200,000 fields) it may take a lot of time for you to define a proper configuration.

In LAIKA 4 it is not an issue anymore: we completely reworked a part that is responsible to for metadata configuration. Which means that you will have:

• a lighning fast storage for metadata configuration
• a dedicated API to perform configuration automatically and designed for external use
• a new shiny configuration screens as a part of ConfigUI application
• a new straightforward realtions between configuration objects (like locales, channels, fields, sections and permissions) without any duplications

And for sure you will have the same fucntionality in terms of how it will be displayed inside STRELKA application. There is no need to highlight that new release even faster than previous especially on the large amount of data and the large amount of metadata fields. You could configure to display 1,000 fields (or even more) for one product in a several clicks and system will do it without any issues. We have no idea why you might need that, but if you want we got you covered.

As you could see this is a big change that is bigger than just movement from JSON-based metadata configuration to a dedicated database and API. And you may wonder is it like a smooth release for us or we will need to reconfigure everything from scratch? And our answer is simple: we created a special tools that will perform migration from your existing LAIKA 3 configuration to a new LAIKA 4 model in a single run. In the most cases such migration will be performed fully automatically, but you could reach our team and discuss your configuration with us if you want to be sure that this upgrade will not change anything in your current configuration.

LAIKA 4 is a big step forward for our platform. LAIKA could support any real-life product management use-case and scenario even with huge amount of data and with this new update you could do all of the neccessary configuration for your specific case in a several clicks. It really doesn't matter how many fields you will have or how many categories or how rich your product type taxonomy is: LAIKA will handle it with ease.

Reach us to get more details about the timeline and upgrade path for your LAIKA installation to get the latest LAIKA 4 update.