Redstone iPaaS 5.1 — on .NET 10, ready for AI

Redstone iPaaS 5.1 is being rolled out to customers now. It is the largest platform update since the 5.0 line: the entire stack moves onto Microsoft .NET 10, the current Long Term Support release, and the runtime, security and integration layers move with it.

How you use Redstone does not change. Your forms, connectors, scripts, pipelines and integrations carry forward as they are. What changes is what the platform underneath them can do — and what it costs to run.

Why .NET 10, and why now

.NET 10 is Microsoft's Long Term Support release. Supported releases are the only ones that receive security fixes, and a platform that carries other people's finance, HR and operations workflows has no business running on anything else.

That sits behind the promise we already make on Redstone: up to 10 years of LTS on one continuously maintained upgrade path. We deliver that decade by moving customers forward through each supported runtime, not by freezing them on an old one. Customers who adopted Redstone six or seven years ago will be on 5.1 alongside everyone else — one supported platform in the field, not a trail of fragmented versions.

What you get

Faster, on less hardware

• Lower memory pressure. The .NET 10 JIT keeps far more short-lived work off the managed heap, so garbage collection runs less often and pauses less when it does. Long-running integration workers hold a flatter memory profile over a week.
• More throughput per node. Better inlining and devirtualisation across the hot paths Redstone spends its time in — JSON handling, HTTP, and the data-transformation layer behind every pipeline.
• Faster cold start. Workers, scheduled jobs and headless API instances reach ready state sooner, which matters most when a node is replaced mid-window.
• Modern CPU support. The runtime uses the newer vector instruction sets on current server silicon, including ARM64 — the same Redstone build, more work per core.

The practical result is capacity headroom you already paid for: the same workload on the same servers, with room left over.

Ready for AI — on your infrastructure

.NET 10 ships Microsoft's unified AI abstractions, and 5.1 builds Redstone's AI surface directly on them. That has one consequence worth stating plainly: the model provider is a configuration choice, not an architectural one.

• Bring your own model. Point Redstone at a hosted provider, an in-region enterprise endpoint, or a model running on your own hardware. Swapping providers is a settings change, not a rebuild.
• Your data stays where you put it. Redstone still runs headless, on-prem, in your cloud tenancy or fully air-gapped. Nothing is sent anywhere you have not explicitly pointed it.
• Workflows as tools. Redstone workflows can be exposed as callable tools, so an assistant can trigger a governed, audited, permission-checked process instead of being handed raw database access.
• Streaming responses. First-class server-sent-event support means AI output streams into forms, dashboards and mobile apps token by token rather than arriving as one late block.
• Documents you can ask questions of. Embedding and vector-search support lets contracts, invoices, tickets and SOPs already flowing through Redstone be retrieved by meaning, not just by keyword.
• The same governance as everything else. AI calls run through the existing middleware: authentication, rate limits, logging and audit trails. An AI step in a workflow is as traceable as an API step.

Security

• Post-quantum ready. .NET 10 exposes the standardised post-quantum algorithms (ML-KEM, ML-DSA) where the host operating system provides them. That matters now, not in a decade — encrypted traffic captured today can be decrypted later, so long-lived confidential data needs a migration path before the hardware arrives.
• Passkeys. The identity stack supports passkey and WebAuthn sign-in, so phishing-resistant authentication is available without a third-party product.
• Current cryptographic defaults. Modern TLS defaults and updated certificate handling, inherited from the runtime rather than maintained by hand.
• A shorter patch path. Security fixes arrive as a supported runtime update instead of a platform migration project.

Operations and integration

• Smaller, quicker containers. Leaner runtime images mean faster pulls, faster rollbacks and less to scan.
• OpenAPI 3.1. Redstone's APIs describe themselves in the current specification, so client generation and API-gateway import work without hand-patching the document.
• Runs everywhere, still. Windows x64, Linux x64, Linux ARM64 and macOS; headless API server or console mode. ARM64 is a first-class target, which is where the cheaper compute now lives.
• Better diagnostics. Improved runtime metrics and tracing feed straight into existing observability — including Excentry, if you run it.

What stays the same

This is a platform upgrade, not a migration.

• No breaking changes to workflow, form or pipeline definitions.
• Endpoints, credentials, integrations and database schemas are preserved.
• Custom connectors are recompiled against the 5.1 SDK; in the overwhelming majority of cases that is a rebuild, not a rewrite.
• One upgrade path, as always — you do not end up on a fork.

Rollout timeline

What we need from you

• During August: exercise your custom connectors and scripts in the upgraded sandbox and report anything that behaves differently.
• Flag pinned dependencies. If a connector depends on a native library or a third-party component tied to an older runtime, tell us early — that is the one case that needs work rather than a rebuild.
• Confirm your September window. Production upgrades are rolling and scheduled around you; we will not pick the window for you.

If anything above affects a deployment you are responsible for, or you want to talk through the AI capabilities against a specific process, get in touch and we will walk you through it.