We have just released a new version of Kill Bill 0.22.x: Release Notes. Besides introducing our initiatives for cloud billing and payment, we’ve also been working on improving:
- Core billing and payment enhancements and bug fixes
- Ease-of-use for APIs and API documentation
- Documentation
- Package manager
Kill Bill Core
From a core billing and payment point-of-view, we have focused our energy around the ease-of-use of our APIs. We have also addressed the most relevant bugs and requested system enhancements.
Some of these enhancement are visible to the user (for example, the ability to specify an external key on the subscription object). Others are internal re-implementations of our sub-systems to lead to a more unified story. One example is reworking the invoice adjustment logic as described in the Behavior Changes section of our 0.21.5 release notes.
We have also spent some time improving the foundations of our stack. We’ve made multiple updates on our internal queue (bus events and notifications), to ensure it is more robust and performs even better. We have tested such enhancements in the cloud; we were able to sustain 600 events/sec, providing solid foundations to support most large customers.
Kill Bill Cloud Initiatives
Another focus area has been our cloud story. We have made internal enhancements to our stack to work better in a cloud model. We’ve also launched a couple of offerings for cloud billing and payment:
Cloud.KillBill.io
We have launched cloud.killbill.io, which is our latest version of Kill Bill running in the cloud. Kill Bill in the cloud provides users with a free sandbox in which to get familiar with the technology – no setup required!
Kill Bill and the AWS Marketplace
We have launched a couple of products on the AWS Marketplace:
Kill Bill AMI
The Kill Bill AMI is an easy way to start a full Kill Bill stack. It includes a local database and our admin UI, Kaui. This is ideal for custom test environments.
Kill Bill Cloud Formation
The Kill Bill Cloud Formation is a cloud formation template to start a production environment with multiple instances of Kill Bill and Kaui, all connected to an RDS database. You can launch a production-ready deployment in minutes.
Documentation and Tooling
We have also spent a fair amount of effort improving our main documentation site along with our API documentation.
On the tooling side, we have improved our package manager (KPM) to be more robust and to allow third-party plugin installations. We’ve enhanced our internal tools to help troubleshoot issues when they arise.
What’s Next?
We are expecting to keep working on our various cloud billing and payment offerings in the near future to provide a unified story, starting from the ease of getting started to the ability of running a full production system in the cloud.
In terms of features, Kill Bill already has a fairly feature rich system, but there has been some demand for a few specific features (for example, #277). We encourage users to request desired features and possibly contribute in some fashion. Many thanks to our GH sponsors!
Also, if you are using Kill Bill as your billing and payment platform, we would appreciate any form of feedback from Capterra reviews, GH stars, or even simply reaching out and letting us know about your use case! (By the way, we recently published some new use cases.)
