September 2023

Cloudbeds is growing quickly, we need to make adaptations to our system to handle this growth.  Cloudbeds has decided that we will be implementing a multi island strategy for our platform.  What this means is that customers will be distributed among different copies of our platform, this is what we call “islands”.  Islands will be regionally specific, US, EU, and APAC and there can be more than one island per region, US1, US2, etc.  We are currently working to bring up our second island, and expect to have our first customer on it by the end of 2023, following this, we will start to add new customers in the first half of 2024.

As a result of this change, there will be some changes in our API we are making to handle customers on the new islands.  The first is a move to strings for all of our IDs.  In order for us to maintain unique IDs across islands we needed longer IDs than can be supported as integers.  Much of our API was already formatted as strings, but we have never used an id that was outside the range of an Integer, so this may result in a breakage of your system.  To facilitate this change, we have introduced a new version of our API, Cloudbeds API v1.2  This new version is a copy of v1.1 with the addition of string IDS.  For each ID that was converted to a string, we have added a separate string field.  So for example in the getHotels endpoint, propertyID is returned in the response, we have also added propertyID_str to the response.  The API v1.2 will be available on new islands only.  

Secondly, the url for properties on new islands will change. The API will only be available for a property on the url of the island on which it resides.  The URLs will follow the pattern US1, US2, EU1, AP1, etc.  So for a property on island EU1 will only be available on the API api.eu1.cloudbeds.com/v1.2/.  An endpoint has been created to discover the island where a property resides, metadata.  This endpoint can be called from an island with an API key or access token.  It will return the URL for the island of a property or organizations associated with the API key or access token. 

As part of this change, there are some rules we are enforcing on properties 

• A single property (propertyID) will only be on a single island.

• An organization ( group of properties ) will always be on the same island.

• We will sometimes move customers to different islands, though we expect this to be rare.  

• Our current customers will remain on the current island at hotels.cloudbeds.com for some time, but could be moved in the future.

A light certification will need to be done for your application on the new island.  Your application will be hidden from customers on new islands until you complete this certification.