“Most data breaches are successful because today’s popular security systems are inflexible and don’t allow organizations to react immediately,” says Sid Prasanna, CEO of FlexSecure. Prasanna and his team set out to build an authentication application that was different, and he’s confident that FlexSecure’s passwordless and “flexible pin” approach to authentication is one of the most advanced security applications on the market. FlexSecure uses Plivo technology for user notifications.

“The reason why it’s easy to hack into accounts is because most of the current security solutions have static credentials and inflexible policies, so ultimately accounts can be compromised by brute force. That’s not the case with FlexSecure,” Prasanna says.

When talking about authentication, Prasanna likes to use a house analogy. “If you only have security at your front door, then once that’s breached an intruder can steal everything in your house. With our application, you can have unique authentication methods on your front door and every room in your house, so if your front door is breached, the bulk of your house can still be secure and intruders can’t steal everything from you.”

FlexSecure enables organizations to mix and match user authentication methods to protect cloud, mobile, and internal applications. FlexSecure is quickly integrated with business applications — typical integration takes less than a day — and is unique in that it uses passwordless security with a “flexible pin” option. FlexSecure doesn’t require end users run an application, so administrators can change authentication policies and pin structures dynamically, in near real time, without impacting the user experience. “At the end of the day, it’s a win for everyone — IT can be proactive or responsive, and the end user doesn’t have to remember any passwords.”

To offer user notification, FlexSecure turned to Plivo. “We decided to integrate Plivo’s SMS API with our application because we liked their support, scalability, and pricing,” Prasanna says.

Plivo helped FlexSecure with onboarding. With support from Plivo’s technical team, FlexSecure integrated the SMS API in less than a day. Plivo also helped FlexSecure with whitelisting all major mobile communications companies.

“We’re a security company, not a telecom company, which means we appreciated that Plivo took care of the complicated telephony infrastructure and carrier relationships,” Prasanna says.

“Our goals with FlexSecure are to offer a data security platform that is easy to use, while being flexible and effective. Using Plivo’s SMS capabilities helps us realize these goals and supports our mission to help companies across all industries improve authentication processes and minimize data breaches.”

The Plivo iOS SDK v2 has launched in public beta. iOS SDK helps you make and receive calls in your iOS applications. This SDK is compatible with devices running iOS version 8 and higher.

One major enhancement in Plivo iOS SDK v2 is that it supports Pushkit and Callkit, meaning applications built using the SDK can receive incoming calls using Apple VoIP Push notifications. Pushkit also eliminates the need for persistent connections to receive incoming calls, thereby reducing device battery consumption by the application. Using Callkit, applications built on the new SDK can now handle VoIP calls with the same level of priority as that of a PSTN call.

To receive an incoming call using Pushkit, you just set up your push credentials, then handle push notifications using the Plivo SDK.

We’ve created a guide to setting up push credentials in the Plivo console. You can refer to our SDK Reference for more information about APIs for handling the push notification. We’ve also developed a full-fledged sample application in Swift that implements all the features of the SDK.

You can get started with the SDK by installing it manually or by using Cocoapods. For manual installation, download the SDK and refer to our installation guide. Alternatively, use our Cocoapods to integrate your application with the SDK.

We’re thrilled to announce the general availability of Browser SDK 2.0, the next version of our web SDK, which enables you to integrate the ability to make and receive calls into your web applications. It provides three major new benefits:

• Web applications that embed the new SDK can now provide details on call quality.
• The SDK supports collecting real-time feedback from users about things like audio quality, caller ID, and digits entered during the call.
• The SDK offers better flexibility for the developers to reduce CPU utilization, improve QoS, and configure the application based on user needs.

Let’s look at each of the benefits in a little more detail.

Visibility into call quality metrics

Whenever an application makes or receives a call using Browser SDK 2.0, the application can track metrics such as latency, jitter, packet loss, and mean opinion score (MOS). Tracking these metrics helps in both assessing the quality of the call and debugging issues.

The SDK also detects real-time network issues using these metrics. These issues are provided as events that your application can handle.

Gather user feedback on the call

You can now collect feedback on calls from end users by using the SDK. Feedback is taken in a five-point scale, with predefined reasons spanning across audio quality, caller ID, and digits entered. Since this feedback is associated with a callUUID, it’s easy to aggregate and act on issues that end users face.

New features for developers

Browser SDK 2.0 offers more flexibility to developers to tailor their applications. With the new SDK developers can now:

• Enable or disable AEC and AGC in Chrome to adjust microphone levels and amplify the audio to make a call clearer. This helps when CPU utilization is required to be low.
• Enable or disable Differentiated Service Code Point (DSCP), which helps in managing QoS if DSCP is supported.
• Configure input, output, and ring devices using our Audio Device API.
• Override the default GeoIP location and explicitly set the user’s current region, which can help Plivo route calls through the nearest servers, thereby reducing audio latency.
• Detect audio issues such as one-way audio or no microphone access and expose them as events that can be handled by the application.
• Retrieve additional call details to debug and troubleshoot issues.

Performance improvements

We’ve also made a couple of performance improvements. The SDK now reduces CPU utilization by 15% by using microphone access on demand. And it supports the Opus codec, which is tolerant of network issues, so call participants won’t experience noticeable issues in audio quality even at 20% packet loss in their network.

Browser SDK 2.0 supports Firefox 51 and above and Chrome 55 and above. It’s not backward-compatible with Browser SDK v1. Browser SDK v1 will be deprecated at the end of 2017.

To help you get started with Browser SDK, we’ve built sample applications that demonstrate its features. Visit the Browser SDK documentation page for a complete list of features and information on implementing them.

Want to send personalized SMS messages to customers right from Google Sheets? You can do it with a little help from Plivo and this SMS automation power sheet. We used Google Apps Script to create an SMS merge feature for Google Sheets.

To use Plivo’s messaging script, you must have a Plivo account, and an SMS-enabled phone number with which you can send messages to your customers. If you don’t have an SMS-enabled number among the numbers on the Phone Numbers page of the console, click Buy Number to get one.

Create a sheet

Now create a new Google Sheet, then click Tools > Script editor to start a new Apps Script project. Copy the content of the scripts.gs file in our GitHub repository and paste it into work area in place of the empty function that Apps Script starts with.

At the top of the file, replace the placeholders XXX.YOUR.AUTH_ID.XXX and XXXXXXXXXXXX.YOUR.AUTH_TOKEN.XXXXXXXXXXX with the Auth ID and Auth Token values for your account, which you can find on the overview page of the Plivo console.

Save the project that contains the Apps Script. Give it any name.

Save the code

Now reload the Google Sheet.

You should see two new sheet tabs at the bottom of the file called Data and Template. The Data sheet has several columns, each of which will be populated with the details of the Send Message API response for that specific row.

You can associate placeholders in your message template with custom columns on the Data sheet. The placeholders will be dynamically replaced with values found in custom columns with the same name. You can add as many custom columns as you like. This is at the core of the SMS merge functionality.

The Template sheet contains the SMS template in the A2 cell. Use the names of any custom columns you create on the Data sheet as placeholders in your template.

To try out our sheet, we created placeholders named NAME, COUPON_CODE, DISCOUNT, and STORE, the actual values of which the script picks up from columns in the data sheet with the same names.

Note that placeholders should be enclosed within double braces in the template, as you can see in the image above.

When you’re done, click on Plivo Messaging > Validate Message Template to check for errors in the message template.

Put data in the sheet

Enter values for all of the columns that are part of your SMS template.

Send messages

When the sheet is ready, click on Plivo Messaging > Send Messages.

The code behind the scenes

Now that you’re familiar with how to set things up, let’s see how we put it together using Apps Script functions to make API calls to Plivo to send the messages.

Sending messages

sendMessages(data) takes a list of row data objects and processes each object one by one.

function sendMessages(data){
  var success = 0;
  var failure = 0;
  var TOKEN = Utilities.base64Encode(AUTH_ID+":"+AUTH_TOKEN);
  for(i=0;i<data.length;i++){
    var row = data[i];
    var tempObj = {
      "src":row['SOURCE'],
      "dst":row['DESTINATION'],
      "text":createMessage(row,template),
    }
    var delivered = trySMS(tempObj,row.row,AUTH_ID,TOKEN);
    delivered?success++:failure++;
  }
  popupAlert("FINAL REPORT : \n\n"+(success+failure)+" row(s) processed \n "+success+" row(s) 
  executed successfully \n "+failure+" row(s) encountered error \n For further details please check api 
  details or each row in the sheet. ",false);
  unhideMetaColumns();
}

Let’s walk through this line by line.

var TOKEN = Utilities.base64Encode(AUTH_ID+":"+AUTH_TOKEN);

This line creates a Base64-encoded token that we send with every API call to authorize Plivo API requests.

for(i=0;i<data.length;i++){
  var row = data[i];
  var tempObj = {
      "src":row['SOURCE'],
      "dst":row['DESTINATION'],
      "text":createMessage(row,template),
  }
  var delivered = trySMS(tempObj,row.row,AUTH_ID,TOKEN);
  delivered?success++:failure++;
}

This for loop iterates over the list of objects and does several operations:

1. Creates a temporary message object containing the source number, destination number, and message text. The message text is generated by the createMessage function, which merges the template with the placeholders. More details on that in a moment.
2. Attempts to deliver the message via the Plivo API.
3. Tracks the success and failure counts.

Once we have success and failure counts, we report them.

popupAlert("FINAL REPORT : \n\n"+(success+failure)+" row(s) processed \n "+success+" row(s) executed successfully \n "+failure+" row(s) encountered error \n For further details please check api details or each row in the sheet. ",false);

Creating messages

The createMessage function iterates over all custom headers. If the custom header is found in the message template then that placeholder is replaced with the actual value. At the end it returns the final message.

function createMessage(data,template_data){
  for (var key in data) {
    if (data.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
        template_data = template_data.replace(new RegExp('{{'+key+'}}', 'gi'),data[key]);
    }
  }
  return template_data;
}

Let’s see how it works using an example.

Suppose we call createMessage(data,template_data) where data and template_data are:

function createMessage(data,template_data){
  for (var key in data) {
    if (data.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
        template_data = template_data.replace(new RegExp('{{'+key+'}}', 'gi'),data[key]);
    }
  }
  return template_data;
}

Then createMessage(data,template_data) will return text

Hi Jane Doe, your coupon code for discount of 20% purchase at Plivo is DUMMY20

API call to send message

The trySMS function, which calls the API to send messages, takes four parameters:

• task, which is the temporary object created by sendMessages()
• row, the row number for which the function is to run
• AUTH_ID, the Plivo account Auth ID
• TOKEN, the Plivo account Auth Token

function trySMS(task,row,AUTH_ID,TOKEN){
   var options = {
    'method' : 'post',
    'contentType': 'application/json',
    'headers':{
      Authorization:"Basic "+ TOKEN
    },
    'muteHttpExceptions':true,
    'payload' : JSON.stringify(task)
  };
  response = UrlFetchApp.fetch('https://api.plivo.com/v1/Account/'+AUTH_ID+'/Message/', options);
  return setStatus(response,row);
}

The first line creates an API call object options that contains all the HTTP parameters required to make the API call to Plivo.

UrlFetchApp.fetch is Google’s predefined function to make API calls. It returns the HTTP response.

Winning with automation

Google Sheets plus Google Apps Script makes an awesome combination that you can use to automate tasks and workflows. We hope you find our SMS sender for Google Sheets useful.

Following the December rollout of our new Voice 2.0 Infrastructure, our team continues to add features and upgrades to improve voice quality. As of today, our Browser SDK supports the Opus codec, which is the best-in-class audio codec for a wide range of voice applications. All applications that use the Plivo Browser SDK for inbound and outbound calling will automatically use Opus as their default codec. Soon we’ll launch Opus support for our Mobile SDK and Zentrunk SIP trunking as well.

Why the Opus codec?

We’ve optimized the opus encoder with reduced complexity on our Plivo network side to reduce decoder complexity on customers’ browsers. We’ve also optimized sampling rates, leading to decreases in browser sampling frequency and thus providing better performance on the browser. All of our optimizations also save bandwidth.

We’ve captured these audio samples that compare how Opus and the PCMU (G.711) codec deal with varying degrees of packet loss. The first sample, with 0% packet loss, sets the baseline for comparison. With increases in packet loss, Opus’s superiority stands out. Even at 30% packet loss, Opus still delivers comprehensible dialogue.

Opus is also efficient. Instead of the 100Kbps of bandwidth our prior WebRTC SDK codecs used, Opus uses 50Kbps. Your application will experience decreases in jitter, latency, and packet loss, and despite poor network connections, your users will experience better voice quality.

What is Opus?

Opus is an open source audio codec that’s optimized for speech and music transmission over the internet. Audio codecs are software that compress and decompress digital audio signals for transmission. These codecs depend on mathematical algorithms and are graded on their ability to retain audio quality while encoding and compressing audio signals.

Opus is highly effective at reducing bandwidth consumption and CPU usage during audio transmission while maintaining high-fidelity audio signals. It’s known for its ability to handle a variety of VoIP audio applications, including conferencing, help desks, and click-to-call applications.

Why is Opus awesome?

Opus was built to fill the gaps of existing audio codecs, which were not optimized for bandwidth, CPU usage, and the varying bitrates and frame sizes that are needed for next-generation WebRTC-based audio applications. Even though Opus is not new, its high quality and low latency performance have propelled its popularity among applications that use WebRTC. Google’s Chrome browser has adopted Opus as its default codec, and Firefox, Opera, and Chromium browsers all support Opus for WebRTC as well. Because of this broad support, more and more WebRTC applications have been adopting Opus to transmit speech over the internet.

Here’s how Opus stacks up against other popular codecs, per its creators Jean-Marc Valin (Mozilla/Xiph.Org), Koen Vos (vocTone), and Timothy B. Terriberry (Mozilla/Xiph.Org). As illustrated below, Opus has the lowest delay (26.5ms by default), flexible bitrate, and a broad range of bandwidth support (narrowband to fullband), and it’s optimized for real-time communication.

Extreme audio optimization

Opus can adjust bitrate, audio bandwidth, and frame size dynamically on live calls. This support for a range of bitrates, frame sizes, audio bandwidths, sampling rates, and multistream frames ensure that a wide variety of applications can use Opus to transmit audio. This flexibility allows Opus to compensate for varying internet speeds and issues that users could experience without notice. For example, if a user has a congested Wi-Fi router or experiences low network bandwidth, Opus can automatically and seamlessly switch to a lower bitrate for smaller bandwidth consumption.

Errors and packet losses are unavoidable when complex systems interact. Opus has many features and strategies to mitigate poor audio quality during low network connections.

Reduced jitter

Ideally, in a perfect high-bandwidth, low-latency environment, the network should deliver a steady stream of packets on a continuous basis. However, even if audio data is being transmitted and played in the right order but not played to the exact timing, sound distortions can occur. Here’s an illustration comparing a steady stream of packets during zero congestion versus the same audio transmission (i.e., same packet stream) in a congested environment.

VoIP applications can experience a lot of jitter because high fidelity audio requires high bandwidth. However, even in the event of packet loss, Opus has built-in features such as Packet Loss Concealment (PLC) and dynamic frame sizes to mitigate the symptoms and detection of jitter by the human ear.

When voice is transmitted over IP, packet loss can occur during decoding. Opus can use PLC to mask the effects of packet loss. When the codec detects that a packet is missing, Opus can use several PLC strategies to hide gaps in lost information. Opus can replace lost speech frames with zeros (i.e., zero insertion), reconstruct missing gaps by repeating a portion that has been successfully received (i.e., waveform substitution), or use speech models and algorithms to fill gaps in speech (i.e., model-based methods). These strategies are especially important for calls to and from areas of low bandwidth networks or Wi-Fi congestion.

Lower latency

The human ear can detect latency greater than 250ms. While 300ms is considered industry wide as poor latency, the International Telecommunication Union recommends that latency should be kept below 150ms to ensure that symptoms of poor voice quality doesn’t affect calls. Our platform is optimized to deliver connectivity under 50ms to all customers around the globe, and support for high value audio codecs such as Opus plays a large role. Opus solves latency issues by supporting variable and constant bitrates and being able to adjust bitrates dynamically.

• Support for variable bitrate (VBR) and constant bitrate (CBR). Voice transmission requires a variable bitrate — the ability to change bitrate dynamically to adapt to the audio being encoded. VBR can help achieve a lower bitrate for the same voice quality, which means that it can consume less bandwidth than CBR, leading to improvements in audio quality.
• Dynamic bitrates from 6Kbps to 510Kbps. Opus will adjust its bitrate between 6 to 510 kilobits per second (Kbps) according to packet loss and round-trip time (RTT) reports during live audio transmission. If an audio call is experiencing increased packet loss and long RTT, then Opus will automatically switch to a lower bitrate to compensate and reduce congestion. The ability to change bitrates dynamically ensures that applications consistently deliver high voice quality and clarity.

Better packet loss concealment

Mitigating packet loss is especially important in real-time communication, because there’s no time to resend missing packets. Even low levels of packet loss can cause unnecessary breaks in audio; when packet loss is severe, complete sentences could be missing. Even though Opus cannot alleviate packet loss, it can mask the symptoms with reconstruction algorithms like forward error correction (FEC) and other PLC strategies.

• Forward error correction (FEC). FEC can improve audio quality because it can reconstruct a missing packet from information from neighboring packets that were previously or subsequently transmitted.
• Flexible error propagation. In the event of packet loss, other audio codecs utilize long-term prediction (LTP) filter states that spend more bits throughout the packet, which requires significant increases in bitrate and delay. To mitigate this, Opus reduces LTP filter states to the beginning of a packet, spending more bits only during the first pitch period, but saving bits throughout the packet transmission. This decreases potential voice quality issues and allocates more bandwidth to transmission.

Reduced audio bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of information that can be transmitted over a period of time. The larger the bandwidth the more data can be transmitted. Increasing bandwidth can lead to better audio quality. Strategies for better utilizing bandwidth include transmitting more data each time, transmitting the same amount of data faster, or reducing the amount of data that needs to be transmitted. Opus deploys discontinuous transmission (DTX) to reduce the amount of data being transmitted during periods of silence.

Most audio calls have intermittent pauses and periods of silence, therefore by reducing the packet rate during silence can save bandwidth and CPU usage. DTX give Opus the ability to detect silence and reduce packet rates when no one is speaking. Then, when audio resumes, Opus can increase the packet rate seamlessly.

Opus’ adaptability and robustness makes the codec suitable for VoIP applications running on stand-alone software or web browsers. See for yourself and let us know what you think.

Plivo now provides detailed SMS error codes for every outbound SMS text message that fails to be delivered. These error codes can help you understand the reasons for delivery failures and troubleshoot issues with your outbound SMS messages.

Message states and SMS error codes

When you send an SMS message from your application to Plivo’s servers, we queue it up to send it to our carriers at an appropriate rate that meets their compliance requirements, and we pass your application the message_state queued. Upon successfully sending your message to our carriers, we update the message_state to sent. Once the destination carrier reports that it has received the message, we update the message_state to delivered.

This, of course, is the ideal scenario in which everything works as it should. However, in systems involving multiple layers, where messages may traverse multiple downstream carriers before delivery, errors can occur — and when they do, we wanted to have an easy way for our customers to diagnose and resolve any issues. That starts with identifying the source of the problem, which is where SMS error codes come in.

Plivo sends SMS error codes at each stage of the delivery process, depending on the message_state returned. That is, if delivery is unsuccessful when we tried to deliver a message to a carrier, the message_state will be updated from queued to failed and an accompanying error_code will be given.

If a message is successfully sent to the carrier, it can still hit roadblocks that can cause the SMS to fail. In this scenario, the message_state would change from queued to sent, then to undelivered, which is also accompanied by an error_code.

Here’s an illustration of the delivery path and the message_states that can occur.

When there are issues with SMS delivery, some carriers alert us with a delivery report that may include information about the failure. However, we work with carriers in hundreds of countries, and each of them has a different method and frequency of reporting information about SMS failures. Some carriers send error codes for nearly every undelivered SMS, while others send them for fewer than 5% of undelivered messages.

Because there’s no standard for reporting error codes and not all carriers support delivery reports, we can’t control the delivery, quality, or frequency of error reporting. However, for the error codes we do receive, we wanted to build a model so that our customers could have a standardized way to identify delivery issues. To do that, we aggregated all the error codes from each carrier and mapped them to a set of error code categories that capture the entire spectrum of potential issues with SMS deliverability. Now, when a carrier reports an SMS error while trying to deliver your text message, it’s mapped to one of our standardized SMS error codes.

For every SMS message that you send through the Plivo platform, Plivo now returns a message_state of queued, sent, delivered, failed, or undelivered, and we provide an SMS error code in the error_code parameter when messages have failed or were undelivered.

Message states and error codes are sent to the callbackUrl set in your application. To retrieve the details of a specific message, make an HTTP GET request to the Message API with the message_uuid appended to the BaseURI. Alternatively, visit the Messaging > SMS Logs page of the Plivo console.

Here are the SMS error codes that we return. You can find an updated list of error codes in our documentation. Going forward, whenever your text message doesn’t reach its destination, refer to the SMS error code to identify the issue.

Troubleshooting SMS delivery using API response codes, message_states, and SMS error_codes

Plivo provides error codes at three levels to help you identify exactly where an error occurred. At the most basic level, the standard 200 HTTP status code provides the response to potential errors between your application and our API. If your application receives anything other than a 200 response, there’s likely a bug in your application.

Next, if your application receives a successful 200 HTTP status code, then it’s time to check your message_state. The message_state indicates where the error may have occurred. A Failed status means that your SMS was queued by our systems but failed to deliver to the carrier. If your message_state is Undelivered, then even though Plivo successfully delivered the SMS to the carrier, the carrier failed to deliver the message to the destination. In the event of any failed message states, check the SMS error code for details on the error.

Finally, since not all carriers support delivery reports, some messages that show the Sent message_state could still have errors, so check your SMS error codes if issues persist.

If SMS delivery issues do persist, try these actions.

• Check that you’ve set the correct “src”and “dst” phone numbers. You could be successfully sending and receiving text messages to an incorrect phone number.
• Is the destination number roaming outside of their local network? In a few cases, our carriers might not support international roaming. Our carriers send us delivery reports only if their destination carriers do the same, so if the destination carrier never responds back, then our carrier can’t provide a delivery report either.
• Is the destination number in a Do Not Contact (DNC) list? A few countries (including India) have a DNC list. Because they’re bound by consumer protection regulations, our carriers cannot deliver messages to recipients who have opted in to DNC lists. If a recipient opts out of a DNC list, carriers can deliver text messages normally.

If you continue to have SMS delivery problems despite taking all the necessary actions, please open a support ticket so we can help you resolve the problem. Be sure to include message_uuids of the text messages affected (preferably messages from within the last 72 hours).

Feb 13, 2017

5 mins

The Missing AWS OpsWorks CLI

Plivo's SMS API and Voice API enables businesses to communicate with their customers at global scale. Sign up for free now.

Integration

Open Source

Engineering

We at Plivo need to constantly deploy updates to our infrastructure that consists of large number of servers spread across multiple regions and continents worldwide. Unfortunately, the complexity of this infrastructure requires very specific and scalable deployment tools that were not already available.

The OpsWorks Command Line Interface (CLI) is a deployment tool for managing AWS OpsWorks. We built the OpsWorks CLI because the standard AWS CLI UI does not have any way to perform simultaneous operations across multiple stacks, a logical group of servers that you want to manage together. We have been using our own OpsWorks CLI extensively for the last year and we’re happy to be opening it up to everyone. We hope that DevOps teams already using AWS and especially those that are also using AWS OpsWorks can use our open source CLI to easily manage multiple server instances at once.

What is AWS OpsWorks?

If you’re familiar with configuration management, then you likely already know Chef, the automation platform. OpsWorks is a free configuration management service provided by AWS that uses Chef, but exposes a friendly user interface on top of it. OpsWorks uses Chef to automate how servers are configured, deployed, and managed across your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances or on-premises compute environments. OpsWorks splits your architecture into stacks. For example, for a simple wordpress setup you could have a production and a staging stack, each with a database and a web layer.

Why OpsWorks?

There are many configuration management solutions, such as Chef, Puppet, Salt, Ansible, and the list goes on… But none of those actually come with a user-friendly UI in their community editions. Most of those also require setting up a central server to take care of delivering the configuration to your servers, which is another point of failure that you need to make highly available too.

OpsWorks is free, runs on both EC2 and on premise, and brings you a powerful UI to inspect and maintain your stacks. You simply point OpsWorks at a Git repository or S3 Bucket with your cookbooks (Chef jargon for the files that actually define how your servers are provisioned) and define which files and servers should run. And because this is built on top of Chef, you can use some of the +3,000 existing cookbooks.

Finally, it has an easy to use auto-scaling feature based on CPU, Memory and Disk Usage, and can automatically start new instances to accommodate for higher loads.

What is OpsWorks CLI?

OpsWorks comes with a neat user interface that allows you to manage a stack: start and stop instances, perform configuration updates, deploy code, check the status of a load-balancer, etc. But the UI does not have any way to perform those operations across multiple stacks at once. What if you wanted to run a specific configuration update on all your production stacks? Or update all your database layers across all stacks?

This is where our CLI comes in: with a simple command line, it allows you to do everything you would be able to do on the UI. In addition, you can run your deployments across your whole infrastructure with a smart and intuitive filtering system. Our OpsWorks CLI also comes with an interactive prompt so that you do not have to access the AWS Console for trivial tasks.

Features and Benefits

OpsWorks CLI is built with scalability in mind. For example, with the OpsWorks CLI, we can easily run a simultaneous deployment on 20 stacks, while constantly pulling the AWS API to retrieve the deployments’ statuses in real time.

Simple Commands

Relying on the AWS API, we built a set of simple commands to help you easily run commands across stacks and regions. These commands can be used in conjunction with smart filters to quickly identify, setup, update, configure and deploy instances. You can also achieve more complex functionality including looking at past deployments of each stack and monitoring elastic load balancers, check for the health of instances, and much more.

Error Code	Error Reason	Description
10	Invalid message	The message content is blank or exceeds the character limit of 1,600 for messages encoded with GMS or 737 for messaged encoded with Unicode. Note that while we provide a separate error code to indicate that a message is too long, some carriers only send an “invalid message” error and don’t differentiate between blank messages and long message errors.
20	Network error	The carrier delivering the text message had network issues. To resolve this, retry at a later time when the carrier network is unaffected.
30	Spam detected	One of the most common reasons for SMS delivery failure is carrier-level spam filters. Carriers use systems and algorithms to detect spam content and block it before it gets delivered. Unfortunately, these filters are always hidden, subject to carrier preferences, vary from carrier to carrier, and can be changed without notice. Another common reason why this error code could be returned is that you may have attempted to send too many messages using long code phone numbers in the US and Canada. Long codes are 10-digit phone numbers and are intended only for peer-to-peer (P2P) communication. If this issue persists, we recommend using short codes for sending bulk messages within the US and Canada. [Editor’s note 2021: Also consider 10DLC.] If you’re confident that your message content is compliant, retry sending the message. You can also contact our support team to whitelist your message one time with our downstream carriers.
40	Invalid source number	The source number you entered is either not in the correct format, not SMS-enabled, or not assigned to your Plivo account. Check the “src” phone number in your application and ensure that it’s in the correct format and has the ability to send text messages. All phone numbers in your application should include country code, area code, and phone number without spaces or dashes (for example, 14155555555 for US or +491155555555 for Berlin, Germany).
50	Invalid destination number	The destination number you entered is either not entered correctly, not SMS-enabled, or is a PSTN landline. Check the “dst” phone number in your application to ensure that it can receive text messages. All phone numbers in your application should include country code, area code, and phone number without spaces or dashes (for example, 14155555555). If you’re sending multiple text messages, make sure that the phone numbers are separated with the “<” character (14156667777<14157778888<14158889999).
60	Loop detected	The carrier cannot route your SMS because settings in your application set up an endless loop of messages being sent and received between your “src” and “dst” phone numbers. This can occur when two auto-responding SMS applications start to talk to each other and end up in a loop. Carriers detect loops by comparing messages within a predefined period of time to previous messages sent and received. SMS loops can increase unnecessary spend, so it’s a good idea to create loop filters in your applications, because not all carriers have loop detection. In some cases, this error code is returned when the carrier determines that it’s impossible to route the message, so it has to be dropped, as it’s being looped between platforms.
70	Destination permanently unavailable	The “dst” phone number is not active and there’s no indication of when it will become available. This is a broad error code where the carrier has not indicated the reason for the destination unavailability. Check the “dst” phone number to ensure that it’s correct. Also try sending messages to an alternative number to ensure that all other parts of your application are working.
80	Destination temporarily unavailable	The “dst” phone number is not reachable. This is a broad error code, and often the carrier doesn’t indicate the reason for the destination being temporarily unavailable. Possible reasons could include a handset being turned off or out of coverage. To resolve this error, retry your messages at a later time.
90	No route available	The carrier and fallback carriers were not able to deliver the SMS message because the route wasn’t available. Carriers don’t offer the reason why a route isn’t available, but since this is typically a carrier issue, you can contact us to find out on your behalf. Include the message UUIDs of the SMS messages affected.
100	Prohibited by carrier	The carrier rejected the text message because the network didn’t support the message being sent. This can occur if the destination network doesn’t support SMS.
110	Message too long	The message content exceeds the character limit of 1,600 for GSM-encoded and 737 for UTF-encoded messages. Certain characters can increase the message character count significantly. Plivo automatically concatenates messages longer than 160 characters for GSM-encoded messages and 70 characters for UTF-encoded messages. Check our FAQ post on long message concatenation for more details.
200	Source number blocked by STOP from destination number	The destination has opted out from your campaign and blocked all messages sent from your phone number. Opt-outs are typically received via text messages with an opt-out keyword of “STOP.” All messages to destinations that have opted out are blocked until the destination opts in with another response. See our FAQ posts about opt-out and opt-in processes.
201	Outbound messages from US toll-free numbers to Canadian destination numbers are blocked	Your application is attempting to send text messages from a US toll-free number to a Canadian phone number destination. Unfortunately, carriers limit US toll-free phone numbers to sending text message only to US phone numbers.
1000	Unknown error	Delivering your message failed for reasons that are unknown to us and to our carriers. If you notice too many of these, please open a support ticket with us so that we can help you identify the problem. Be sure to include the message UUIDs of recent messages (preferably within the last 72 hours) that were affected.

Command	Description
stacks	list OpsWorks stacks
deployments	list OpsWorks deployments
instances	list instances
apps	list apps
elbs	list Elastic Load Balancers
update	update cookbooks
setup	run setup recipes
configure	run configure recipes
deploy	deploy specified app
recipes	run specified recipes

Smart Filtering

Any Opsworks CLI command accepts three basic filters: layer, stack, and region. These smart filters also support wildcards and regexes to enable complex filtering logic. For example the command below would match all stacks whose name contain wordpress, and only include their database layer:

Another example is using regexes to check ELBs of two wordpress stacks at once:

Interactive GUI and Interactive Prompt

The OpsWorks CLI also offers an interactive prompt if called without any arguments.

How to use OpsWorks CLI?

The OpsWorks CLI accesses the AWS API using your AWS credentials. Once the credentials are configured, you can run opsworks with no arguments to access the interactive prompt. You can use this interactive prompt to accomplish simple tasks including listing stacks, listing instances, inspecting ELBs, updating cookbooks, deploying code, as well as running configurations and setups.

Visit the OpsWorks CLI Github repository for instructions on how to install the OpsWorks CLI: https://github.com/plivo/opsworks.

What’s next for OpsWorks CLI?

We use our OpsWorks CLI extensively at Plivo, so we’re always looking to build out new features and improvements. One feature on our roadmap is to build a bot and connect it to a real-time collaboration platform like Slack and Hipchat. With a few commands in a chat room, engineering teams can monitor and deploy instances without leaving the conversation. This way, the whole team can be instantly updated with all the changes and deployments across the organization.

Another feature we are working on is rolling deployments. Currently the CLI applies a given command to all the instances of a layer at once (just like what the AWS console). The idea would be to do the deployment instance by instance, taking them out of their respective load balancers first, and then putting them back online.

How do I contribute?

Please visit the OpsWorks CLI github page to report issues and help us make this tool even better.

Most companies don’t change their SMS phone numbers, but sometimes changes are forced on them. Fortunately, there are a number of things organizations can do to decrease subscriber churn when changing SMS phone numbers.

Businesses may change their SMS phone numbers for various reasons:

• Combining voice and SMS on the same toll-free phone number. All voice toll-free phone numbers in the US can be enabled with SMS capabilities. Companies can now send and receive SMS text messages on the same numbers they use for voice calling. This means that businesses can opt to combine their subscribers from dedicated SMS virtual phone numbers to a common toll-free phone number. This can provide better branding and lets them more efficiently manage their customer base.
• Switching from a shared to a dedicated short code. Shared short codes are unreliable by nature. When multiple companies share the same short code, and one company violates short code regulations, the carrier can block the entire short code, so all users of that short code suffer the consequences and experience service disruptions. An increasing number of companies are paying a bit more to switch to dedicated short codes for more reliability and control.
• Switching from a random to a vanity short code or phone number. Having a memorable phone number can be a great advantage. Even though short codes, with five or six digits, are already shorter than long codes or toll-free numbers, they still need to stand out. One strategy is to switch to a short code whose numbers spell out the company name (827438 for TARGET, for example). Another is to use an easily recognizable number, such as 888222, which Chipotle uses.
• Switching service providers. Most SMS phone numbers can be ported from one service provider to another, but country and carrier-specific regulations may limit porting, so in some cases businesses must migrate to a new phone number when switching to another provider.

Regardless of which type of phone number you’re migrating to, regulations specify that all SMS subscribers must first opt in to all SMS campaigns. You’re not legally allowed to start sending text messages from a new phone number to your existing customers even if it’s part of the same campaign that your subscribers have opted in to in the past. If you violate any consumer protection laws, then your phone number could be blocked and your company may even be sued by consumers for the violation.

Abrupt changes in your SMS campaign phone numbers can wreak havoc on customer engagement from your subscriber base, especially in a heavily regulated telecom market like the one in the United States. Changing phone numbers can cause subscribers to drop off.

When switching phone numbers, always treat the new phone number as a brand new campaign that each user has to subscribe to again. Here are several tacks you can take to ensure that as you move to a new SMS phone number, your subscribers migrate as well. Not only is retaining your subscriber base important for future marketing campaigns, but reducing churn positively impacts company revenue and the bottom line.

How to retain subscribers while migrating phone numbers

First, a caveat: Not all of your subscribers will opt in for your new campaigns. The techniques we describe here can help migrate a healthy percentage of subscribers to a new campaign phone number, but some will choose to opt out.

Consider toll-free SMS (available in the US)

Toll-free SMS messaging is growing in popularity in the United States. Studies have shown that toll-free campaigns experience better response rates and customer engagement than long codes and short codes, because interactions with toll-free numbers are always free to end users.

Toll-free SMS can also be more affordable for businesses. Toll-free numbers cost only a few dollars and are charged for on a monthly basis, while short codes often cost more than $500 per month and require three months’ payment up front.

Choose a vanity phone number

Whether it’s a toll-free or a short code phone number, having a recognizable, memorable phone number helps you gain and retain subscribers. You can ask your SMS provider to procure a vanity toll-free number with specific digits, and if it’s available, you can typically purchase it for the same price as a regular toll-free phone number and have it enabled within 48 hours.

Many companies have seen higher SMS response and retention rates with vanity short codes as compared to random short codes, especially in competitive markets. Rental fees for vanity short codes, however, are often significantly more than fees for random short codes. You can search for available vanity short codes on the Common Short Code Administration (CSCA) website.

Notify your customers early via web form opt-in

Notify your customers of the transition as early as possible — but remember, a new phone number can receive SMS opt-ins only after it’s activated.

The turnaround time for phone number activation depends on the type of phone number. Long code and toll-free SMS phone numbers can be provisioned quickly. Long code phone numbers can be provisioned instantly if your vendor has an inventory of phone numbers and provides access via an online user interface or API. Toll-free SMS phone numbers in the US may require up to 48 hours for provisioning because a short application is required for carriers to enable toll-free numbers for SMS. By contrast, short code phone numbers can take at least three months to provision because of a complex carrier application process.

Since you can’t receive new opt-ins via SMS until your phone number is active, start using other opt-in mechanisms, including web forms and in-person signups. The best mechanism for opt-in is an online form, because it lets you seamlessly collect new subscriber information and manage your database for your new campaigns. If you’re getting opt-ins in person, use a digitized form to collect opt-ins to minimize human error and eliminate extra time for data entry. You can lead your subscribers to online opt-in forms via:

• Online advertisements (e.g., Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram)
• Email newsletters
• Direct mail invitations
• Offline advertisements (newspapers, banners, posters)

Give incentives for subscribing

Subscriber migration is hard, and even though some users will opt in to a new phone number without any incentives, motivating subscribers with a promotion can go a long way. For example, send your current subscribers a text message with a link to a 20% discount; upon clicking on the link, they can fill out a form to opt in to a new campaign phone number.

Here are a few campaign ideas that can create incentives, add convenience, and make it fun for your subscribers to opt in to a new SMS phone number:

• Special weekly offers
• Flash sales
• Localized offers in their area
• Surprise offers on special days, such as birthdays or Christmas
• Direct discounts on purchases
• Exclusive deals that only this new campaign will get them
• Notifications for order confirmation, deliveries, and inventory availability

Create urgency about switching phone numbers

If subscriber migration is going slowly, give your subscribers a sense of urgency that if they don’t opt in for the new phone number, they’ll no longer receive promotions. Just remember that if you mention a deprecation date to your current subscribers, you should adhere to that date.

Don’t overlap your communication

As your subscribers migrate from an old phone number to a new one, be sure to unsubscribe them from the old campaign. That way, you can avoid any overlap in communication and maintain clean, reliable subscriber data. Eliminating duplicate messages also improves your user experience and helps keep costs down.

Additional takeaways

Before you implement any of these suggestions or run any new campaigns, seek to understand your subscribers. Find out what incentivizes them the most and the best times to send them information. Here are some additional thoughts on running successful and engaging migration campaigns.

Focus on customer engagement. Regardless of the purpose of your campaign, always plan for long-term customer engagement and offer high-quality content and promotions that align with your product and customer incentives.

Create meaningful content. Aligned your content with your customer engagement strategies and company goals. For example, simple discounts are overdone and don’t offer any engagement mechanisms. However, if you put a discount at the end of an engaging SMS survey or riddle, then the engagement will likely be more memorable and encourage customer loyalty.

Optimize your campaign delivery times. CTIA (Cellular Telecommunication Industries Association) guidelines suggest that all marketing campaigns and promotional messages should be sent between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. local time. This not only ensures that your campaigns stay compliant, it also ensures that your messages are read in a timely fashion. Optimal times during the week are typically during the morning commute (between 8:00 and 10:00) and lunch times (between 11:30 and 1:30). During these times, subscribers are typically more receptive to promotional messaging.

Limit SMS frequency for better user experience. To maintain good customer experience, send meaningful messages no more than once a week. Plan your campaigns so that your messages are concise and to the point.

Set a realistic migration rate. Since it’s not realistic to migrate every customer to your new campaign, it’s important to set realistic expectations before the migration begins to ensure that there will be a reasonable completion date and that the migration won’t drag on unnecessarily. Acceptable migration rates can vary across industry and campaigns.

As an example, suppose you’re trying to migrate 10,000 subscribers and have set the acceptable migration rate at 80%. That means that you can deprecate the old phone number when 8,000 subscribers opt in to your new campaign. It also means that you’ve accepted that you’re willing to lose 2,000 subscribers during the migration.

If you’re thinking about migrating phone numbers, have a chat with our customer success team. We can help answer your questions.

2016 was a turning point for Plivo. As we push the envelope in revolutionizing telecommunications, we’re also bringing in new technologies to scale our software infrastructure and build the best customer experience. Our focus for 2016 was to take what we do best and make it the best in the industry. I’m happy to say that it’s paying off.

2016 Year in Review Stats

• Both Gartner and IDC have recognized Plivo as one of the top three vendors in CPaaS space.
• Delivered 2 billion voice minutes and SMS messages combined.
• Increased revenue by 200% to well into double digit millions.
• Increased customer base by 180%.
• Increased voice traffic by 150% and SMS traffic by 200%.
• 2016 marks the third year we’ve been profitable, even with heavy investments and team growth.
• Surpassed 100 team members.
• Increased engineering team by 400%, marketing team by 300%, and sales team by 300%.
• Moved into a new 20,000 square feet office in Bangalore, India. Take a photo tour and read the full details on our New Year, New Office blog post.
• Launched Zentrunk SIP trunking beta in all countries and toll-free SMS messaging in the United States.
• Launched Voice Infrastructure 2.0 to improve voice quality in all regions.
• Added 15 local in-country carriers and added two new data centers: Northern California and São Paulo.

What to expect in 2017

• More investment in infrastructure improvements for voice and SMS.
• Connections to more local in-country carriers to improve quality for all products: SMS API, Voice API, and Zentrunk SIP trunking.
• More investment in marketing and sales teams, to build a larger presence in the market and make a splash about the quality and transparency we bring to the industry.
• More investment in customer success teams to better support existing customers and streamline new customer onboarding.

All the details

Compared to 2015, we experienced 200% growth in SMS traffic and 150% growth in voice traffic. We delivered more than 2 billion SMS messages and voice minutes combined in 2016. To put this in context, the volume of SMS messages and voice minutes we currently deliver in a week is the same as what we delivered in a month in early 2015. With such significant increases in volume, we took a step back to focus on quality, and the market has noticed. Both Gartner and IDC have recognized Plivo as one of the top three vendors in CPaaS space.

As a company, we decided early on that we won’t compromise on quality. That’s why in 2016, even in the middle of significant growth, we dedicated six months of time and resources to improving our voice quality and positioning our infrastructure for long-term scalability. The result was our Voice Infrastructure 2.0, which features significant improvements to our voice backbone, including new data center locations in South America (Brazil) and US-West (Northern California), improvements in our global network and voice routing algorithm, optimized global routing, optimized intra-region connectivity, and less than 20ms connectivity to carrier peering hubs.

The underlying network of carriers is another big quality-of-service factor that Plivo brings to the table. In 2016, we built a dedicated team to focus on critical carrier relationships, and added 15 new direct connections to local in-country carriers in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, Singapore, Japan, Italy, Russia, Turkey, Sweden, Mexico, India, South Africa, UAE, and Spain. With these direction connections, we’ve seen significant improvements in call quality and SMS delivery rates. Going forward, we’ll continue to increase direct connections to local in-country carriers, increase carrier redundancy, and ultimately increase voice quality and SMS delivery in all regions.

All of these quality improvements impact every Plivo product, which means that any new product or feature we release on our platform gains the same high quality of service. Last year, with the release of Zentrunk SIP trunking for all coverage areas, as well as toll-free SMS in the US, we’ve seen quality improvements that led to rapid growth and adoption from new and existing customers. We plan to make more updates to our infrastructure in the next few months to raise the bar on call quality and SMS delivery.

We take a lot of pride in the amazing team that’s helped us get to this point. Naturally as our business grows, our team grows too. We broke the 100 team member milestone this year. Engineering is core to our business, and that team grew by 400% last year. Our sales and marketing teams grew by 300%, and that has been pivotal in our revenue growth. To accommodate this growth, we moved our Bangalore, India, office to a brand new 20,000-square-foot space with a cafeteria, hot desk spaces, lounge areas, large meeting rooms, collaboration rooms, and a games room.

This year marks the third year we’ve been profitable, and our profitability continues to grow even with our aggressive team growth, new office, infrastructure investment, and increases in our marketing budget. We couldn’t have achieved these milestones without our customer base, which grew 180% in 2016. This of course has a direct impact on our annual revenue, which increased by 200% and is leading us well into double-digit millions.

What we’ve learned, and what you can expect in 2017

Sometimes you have to take a step back in order to move forward, and this year we did just that. This year we took a step back from releasing multiple new features and products. Instead, we focused on quality and dedicated a lot of resources and time to improving our infrastructure and carrier connectivity — and it’s already paying off. Our voice quality has improved with faster connectivity, fewer dropped packets, less jitter, and less crosstalk, and our customers have noticed the difference, especially during international voice calls. In 2017, you can expect to see us investing more in our infrastructure and signing on more local in-country carriers to improve quality for all of our products. And we’ll continue to invest in our marketing and sales teams to build a larger presence in the market and make a splash about the quality and transparency we bring to the industry.

Thank you for joining us on this journey to disrupt the telecommunications industry. We plan to bring you many more improvements, features, products, and services that add value to your experience.

If you have any feedback or feature requests, please contact our support team.

Cheers,

The Plivo Team