Release Notes 2025.08

Aug. 26, 2025

What is in this release?

Over the past few months, we at Maki have been working on one of the biggest changes in the history of our platform. Therefore, this release contains no new functionality, but behind the scenes a huge technical operation was carried out: a complete upgrade of our search database Elasticsearch from version 7.17.22 to 9.1.2.

Why this upgrade was big

With the move to Elasticsearch 8, the search technology has been completely rewritten and modernized. One of the most important changes is that all communication is now asynchronous.

  • Asynchronous means that operations are no longer performed step by step (synchronous), but can run simultaneously. This makes systems faster and more efficient, but also requires a completely different way of programming.
  • In modern software development, this has become the standard because it provides better performance and scalability.

For Maki, this meant that we could not simply install an update, but had to rewrite thousands of lines of code to the new way of working.

What has been modified

In total, more than 800 files were modified, accounting for some 20,000 lines of code. The biggest changes took place in the following sections:

  • Controllers
    The controllers are the “traffic controllers” of Maki: they receive requests from the user and determine what actions to perform. These have all been rewritten to the new async mode of operation so that they can respond faster and more efficiently.
  • Searchqueries
    These are the queries that Maki uses to retrieve information from Elasticsearch. All queries have been converted to the new Elastic syntax and made fully async. This ensures better performance and stability.
  • Searchmappings
    Mappings describe how data is stored and searchable in Elasticsearch. This structure has been completely adapted to the new syntax of Elasticsearch 9.
  • Searchdenormalizers
    Denormalizers are the “bridge” between events in the system and the database. For example, when a bookmark is added, changed or deleted, a denormalizer translates this event to the appropriate mutation in Elasticsearch.
    During the upgrade, all denormalizers were converted to async and AtomicUpdate was introduced. This was necessary because with asynchronous operation, multiple changes could be executed simultaneously, leading to overwrites. With AtomicUpdate, this is prevented and it is guaranteed that the correct latest state is always saved.

What this means for customers

For you as users, nothing changes externally – Maki continues to work as you are used to. Behind the scenes, however, a much more modern foundation is now running, which provides:

  • Better performance and scalability
  • More stability in searches and updates
  • A solid foundation for future new features

Collaboration

Through strong collaboration between developers and testers, we successfully completed this challenging release. Despite the technical bumps along the way, the process went smoothly and Maki is ready for the future.

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