FusionAuth version 1.47 shipped in late July, 2023. This version includes performance improvements, the ability to collect preferred languages on basic registration forms, and SAMLv2 assertion encryption.
The focus of these updates is performance. In fact, I hereby dub 1.47 the “Performance Panther” release.
All in all there are 21 issues, enhancements, and bug fixes included in the 1.47.0 and 1.47.1 releases. As always, please see the release notes for a full breakdown of the changes between 1.46.0 and 1.47.1, including any schema changes.
Performance Improvements
There were a number of performance improvements in these releases, as the team focused on making FusionAuth even faster and more scalable.
Some improvements are only applicable for Enterprise clients. This included lowering the memory overhead when downloading and storing the IP location database. This IP data is used by Advanced Threat Detection.
Other improvements apply to all FusionAuth users. These include:
- Reworking the internal caching system, which improves performance when creating or deleting hundreds or thousands of applications, keys or other configuration.
- Capturing timing metrics around HTTP requests and Lambda and Connector invocations. These will be exposed in the System Status API response.
- Limiting the number of languages associated with a user. Sorry, you’ll just have to make do with 20. In certain cases providing too many languages during registration caused performance impacts to the system.
- Enabling JVM garbage collection logging. Reviewing garbage collection logs, while no fun, can help you understand how the JVM is impacting FusionAuth’s abilities to authenticate your users.
Happy tuning!
Preferred Languages On The Basic Registration Form
FusionAuth has self-service registration. It comes in two flavors:
- Basic registration, which is available with all plans, including the forever free Community plan.
- Advanced registration, which requires a paid plan.
In either case, when enabled, your users can self-register for your application by providing certain information.
With basic, you are limited to a number of common registration fields, such as first name and last name. With 1.47, your users can now choose a preferred language when registering.
To set it up, you’d enable it in the basic registration configuration.
Then, the user will now see a dropdown when registering. This page can be themed, of course.
This feature is useful if your application supports multiple languages and you want to send your welcome email in the language your user prefers. Previous to 1.47, you had to use advanced registration forms to get this functionality.
SAMLv2 Assertion Encryption
As of version 1.47, FusionAuth is compatible with a SAML v2 Service Provider (SP) that requires encrypted assertions. This functionality is only available when FusionAuth is acting as the SAMLv2 Identity Provider (IdP). You can enable and configure the behavior on the “SAML” tab of a given Application.
Reasons why SAML assertion encryption might be useful:
- The assertion contains sensitive personally identifiable information (PII).
- The login occurs in a highly secure or regulated environment.
- The assertion contains other sensitive data.
- The SP requires it. :)
Learn more about configuring SAML assertion encryption.
The Rest Of It
As mentioned above, there were 21 issues, enhancements, and bug fixes included in these releases. A selection of the included changes not covered above includes:
- Updating third party dependencies such as Jackson and the PostgreSQL client library.
- New configuration to accept any named parameter as a login hint coming from the SAML v2 SP when FusionAuth is acting as the SAML v2 IdP.
- Upgrading to the latest version of our phone number validation library, which includes support and updates for a number of countries phone numbers.
Read more about all the changes in the release notes.
Upgrade At Will
The release notes are a guide to the changes, fixes, and new features. Please read them carefully to see if any features you use have been modified or enhanced.
If you’d like to upgrade your self-hosted FusionAuth instance, see our upgrade guide.
If you have a FusionAuth Cloud deployment, proceed to the “Hosting” tab on your account dashboard and upgrade your instances. If you have any questions about the upgrade, please open a support ticket.
Or, if we’ve piqued your interest and you’d like to use FusionAuth, check out your options.
