‘Synapse like a pro’ in the biggest of Matrix instances
We’re incredibly proud to announce the launch of Synapse Pro, a new enterprise Matrix server from Element that delivers phenomenal efficiencies for large-scale Matrix deployments in the public sector.
Synapse Pro is Element’s best practice Matrix homeserver for huge public sector deployments. With new functionality written in Rust, it provides a significant step change in performance and resource usage for massive Matrix deployments with high density multi-tenancy, high availability and elastic horizontal scaling. As a result, Synapse Pro’s efficiencies enable both single nation-scale servers as well as multiple small, separate instances within a single footprint; such as a service provider supporting thousands of independent pharmacies.
Synapse itself remains open source, and Element will continue to develop it proactively, just as it has for the last 10 years. Open source Synapse development has accelerated throughout 2024, with huge amounts of work contributed by Element to implement Matrix 2.0 - including instant sync, next-gen auth, a transformational improvement in encryption and support for native VoIP. Available under a commercial license, Synapse Pro will help fund and accelerate the continued open source development of Synapse for the benefit of all of Matrix.
The new shared microservices and components within Synapse Pro power optimisations that save significant resources for large-scale public sector deployments. Synapse Pro is now at the core of Element Server Suite (ESS), the Kubernetes-based professionalised backend for Matrix-based communications. It provides an incredibly powerful and extremely cost efficient ‘out-of-the-box’ server-side solution alongside comprehensive operational support from Element, saving those maintaining a large-scale Matrix-based environment considerable time and money. Instead those teams can focus on taking advantage of the transformational working practices enabled by sovereign, secure and interoperable communications.
ESS performance and efficiency will continue to improve as Synapse Pro is developed further. ESS also includes Secure Border Gateways (aka proxies or application firewalls) to control federation across large deployments spanning multiple organisations, and fully satisfies all requirements of the ‘Messenger Proxy’ in gematik’s TI-Messenger. ESS also supports air-gapped and high-side environments.
💥Huge cost savings
Synapse Pro delivers massively reduced resource usage for large-scale deployments through a series of optimisations; most notably adding new shared microservices to power high density multi-tenant deployments. It saves resources by eliminating redundant data within server deployments and sharing infrastructure between services. Additionally, it introduces automatic elastic scaling for load management and efficient resource usage, without requiring server restarts. It is the most cost-efficient Matrix backend available for large-scale use. For a typical nationwide deployment it delivers cost savings in the millions.
💥Improved reliability and uptime
Elastic scaling helps unlock full high availability in Synapse Pro, both within a deployment as well as enabling failover across multiple datacenters. That radically improves uptime and network resilience, and ensures zero downtime maintenance derived from rolling updates. One of the biggest benefits is auto-scaling to manage load spikes efficiently, such as a Monday morning when thousands of end-users log-on simultaneously or unplanned events create usage peaks.
💥Available now
Synapse Pro supports ESS and ESS for TI-Messenger and the Matrix protocol V1.11 recently adopted by gematik. With the addition of Synapse Pro, alongside Advanced Security Advisories and easy integration of Secure Border Gateways (aka proxies or application firewalls), Element’s LTS versions are undoubtedly the best way for large deployments to stay safe, secure and fully optimised.
What does Synapse Pro mean for large-scale Matrix initiatives?
Of most importance, it means unrivalled efficiencies for large public sector deployments.
The savings for a nationwide initiative such as TI-Messenger in Germany’s healthcare system are enormous; literally millions of euros if all TI-Messenger deployments were built on Synapse Pro rather than Synapse.
What does Synapse Pro mean for Synapse, smaller deployments and the Matrix community?
Synapse is the original Matrix server written by the team who created Matrix in 2014. In 2017 that same team formed Element, a for-profit company, as a way to continue funding the open source Matrix project. More than 90% of Synapse over the years has been written by Element employees.
Element remains more committed than ever to Synapse as the best practice Matrix homeserver for general use. It’s vital to ensure the long term success of both Element and Matrix. Performance and scalability work that benefits smaller deployments will continue to land in open source Synapse, as will all security work, maintenance and new Matrix features. Synapse will continue to be freely available under the AGPLv3 licence, as it has been since Dec 2023.
We develop Synapse for the open source community, acting as a spearhead to drive Matrix forwards as a protocol and as a network, and as a way for the general community to deploy Matrix 2.0 (e.g. via element-docker-demo).
Meanwhile, Synapse Pro exists to provide scalability improvements specific to massive mission-critical deployments targeting tens of thousands of users or more, subject to tight SLAs - and to help fund development of open source Synapse for the benefit of everybody.
Synapse Pro can transform the economics of TI-Messenger deployments
