Behind the scenes, our developers have been making a lot of changes and improvements to our Retarus Cloud Fax Services.
The Cloud Fax Services have been given a new back end and a brand new fax rendering service. The back end is responsible for processing outbound fax jobs. This includes the scheduling of messages, in other words the transmission of the fax jobs through our faxline servers (“gladiators”), the processing of status notifications from the faxline servers and reporting the final status to the sender gateways of our customers.
The new back end is based on our “actor mesh” state-machine, developed in-house at Retarus, which was first deployed in Retarus Email Security and is earmarked for future use in other products. It is also based on modern technologies like microservices and containers, allowing for virtually unlimited horizontal scaling. The new back end will moreover facilitate new features, such as smarter routing.
The fax rendering process has also been redesigned with a state-of-the-art architecture. This process is responsible for converting the documents in which our customers send us their outbound fax jobs (PDF, DOCX, HTML, XSLX, PPTX, JPG, PNG, BMP, PS, PCL, …) into a faxable format such as TIFF – one of the most cumbersome steps in the processing of outbound fax jobs.
The new rendering service also improves scalability. It will additionally open up new opportunities such as using a variety of rendering components for the same document, implementing customer-specific rendering settings or supporting additional formats.
What both of these new developments have in common is that they add significantly to the robustness of the services and the ease with which they can be deployed. This in turn enables Retarus to implement new features more quickly and securely for our fax customers.
