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Jan 23

25

2025 January AutoPilot Changelog

When we said last time that the Thanksgiving code release in November 2024 was “our biggest and most impactful AutoPilot release ever” we were not kidding!  But also we are not kidding this time when we say that this January 2025 release might be even bigger and spectacularly impactful!  Sounds like we are going to have to dial down the hyperbole and breathlessness and just get down to the facts.

There are some high impact features for the TLDR; crowd and then we’ll get into the more routine bug fixes and small enhancements.

High impact issues:

  • Speed Up AutoPilot UI (#a/issues/178)
    • This enhancement doesn’t just tweak the user experience to be a “little bit” faster, it makes things a LOT FASTER!  Some of our metrics were showing over 15 seconds for page load for a particular user with many deployments.  This is now down to just 0.6 seconds for the same user.
  • Scheduled Hibernation For Deployments (#a/issues/169)
    • The only thing better than the ability to hibernate a deployment is the ability to wake it up for a set amount of time.  This is a big deal.
  • Update To Newest Generation Instance Types (#a/issues/171)
    • If you thought that AWS Graviton 2 CPUs were fast, you haven’t tried Graviton 4!  Frankly we’ve never seen hardware make this much impact.  Noticeable even during TTFB measurements which are not generally CPU bound.  Great job Annapurna Labs!  If you want to enable the Grav4 CPU for your existing deployment, let us know.
  • Added `writable_acl_groups` option to acl mode in `deploy:writable` https://github.com/deployphp/deployer/pull/3957
    • This is kind of neat.  We found a limitation in Deployer (https://deployer.org) and submitted a PR.  Now you can specify Groups to have write permission via POSIX Access Control Lists, not just for individual Users.  Next time you use `getfacl` or `setfacl`, think of us.
  • Remove Support Tabs (#p/issues/89)
    • Support tabs used to be in the “Organization” and “Deployment” tabs.  Now you can find a link to contact Support on any page in the top right of the UI.

The rest of the list is more routine but still interesting!  

New features and enhancements:

  • Default ASG 1 (desired) 10 (allowed) web nodes (#act/issues/110)
    • In the past, you had to manually set AutoScaling to have more than a single web node.  Now we “request” only one node by default but have a “maximum” node count of 10.  The platform will auto-scale up to 10 web nodes if needed.  You can set this limit higher but it can lead to cost overruns.  Be sure to experiment by load testing the platform.
  • Increase Web Files & Storage To have 2 TB (#act/issues/107)
    • Who in their right mind would need THAT much storage?  Oh…
  • Alarm For Disk Utilization (#act/issues/108)
    • 90% and higher will send a message to your “alert” contacts.
  • MYSQL Join Buffer (#ajc/issues/206)
    • Bigger buffers are sometimes better, like in this case.
  • OpenSource PHP Debug & Profiler (#ajc/issues/218)
    • Xdebug is now included in the out of the box configuration.  Not everyone uses it but those who know, know.
  • Improved history defaults (#ajc/issues/199)
    • Shell `history` command is vastly improved by keeping things longer
  • RABBITMQ_PLUGINS included in dockerfile (#ajc/issues/208)
    • Mods to RabbitMQ are now easier.
  • Deployer PR For SetFacl
    • Yup!  This was so great we mentioned it twice!
  • www-data user should be able to run composer install and have an ssh key
    • There seem to be as many deployment patterns as there are developers.  This makes it easier for a subset of our customers to integrate their pipeline.
  • Add A Swap File (#ajc/pull/192)
    • Cloud providers will tell you that it’s not necessary but Linux works better with a swap file, even a small one.
  • NGINX Performance enhancement (#ajc/issues/203)
    • Configuration enhancement for multithreaded file access.  Trust us it’s faster.
  • Persist Home Directory & All Crons not just login user (#ajc/issues/201)
    • Previously, only the default login user had a persistent cron and home directory, now the rest of your users will as well.  This is not back-propagated to older deployments, only new systems will have this feature.
  • CLI Programs Can Only Be Run By Cluster User (#ajc/issues/213)
    • Although it might seem like a good idea you should never run anything as `root`.  We’re kidding, it never seemed like a good idea.
  • Allow end users to override memory limits for services (#ajc/issues/211)
    • Ability to snowflake your deployment by specifying buffers and memory sizings for certain settings.  We don’t recommend this for most users as we have properly calculated sane defaults.  Contact support if this strikes your fancy.
  • Add varnishadm CLI Command (#ajc/issues/222)
    • No longer do you have to log into your Varnish server to run the command.  You can run it from any server in the cluster.  Exciting!
  • Add An Extra Prompt When Deleting Org Or Deployment (#p/issues/88)
    • Creating a new deployment should be easy, tearing one down should be a little more difficult.  We now make a little bit more sure that you mean to delete it.
  • Disable Paste For Delete Box (#p/issues/85)
    • Same as above!
  • Add $15 credit to every new Organization (#a/issues/153)
    • Because sometimes you need to play around and see what the buttons do.  New organizations get $15 of play money.
  • Ability to pay with ACH/Wire or Check (#p/issues/81)
    • Credit cards are great, but some companies have funny rules.  While you still need to provide a credit card as a failback mechanism, we can now accept payment with ACH/Wire or Check.  Reach out to Support for more info.
  • Ability for Support/Admins to change Organization ownership (#a/issues/156)
    • End users still can’t hand off the organization from person to person, but our Support team can.
  • Requested Visual enhancement (#p/issues/74)
    • We listen to users.  From cleaning up language, to enhanced visual queues, we are always working to make the UX better
  • [DOC] Update File Permissions Docs To Include JRC User
  • [DOC] Custom Service Version for customers (#ad/issues/1)

Bug fixes:

  • Issue Hibernating With RDS Cluster (#a/issues/177)
  • Fix File Permissions On Initial Provisioning (#ajc/issues/251)
  • Breaking Changes In Redis Cache Config (#ajc/issues/250)
  • Issue Accepting Invitation Before Account Is Created With Magic (#a/issues/146)
  • Varnish Not Auto-Healing (#act/issues/112)
  • Varnish & Web Healthchecks (#ajc/issues/196)
  • Enhanced PHP-FPM healthcheck when at limits (#ajc/issues/193)
  • Recovery Mount Not Mounted On Reboot (#ajc/issues/205)
  • Graph Errors in monitoring (#p/issues/84)
  • Contention on provisioning causes deployment to fail (#ajc/issues/232)
  • Entries In /mnt/jrc-comms/vars-* Are Duplicated (#ajc/issues/189)
  • OpenSearch Data Being Cleared On Restart (#ajc/issues/247)
  • Varnish Health Check to Report Healthy If Docker Build Is In Process (#ajc/issues/231)
  • Tooltip & Warning Colors, make colors uniform
  • Initial Deployment Uses Deployer With RSYNC Recipe After Composer Create Project (#ajc/issues/241)

These are just some of the issues that went into this release.  Can you believe there are an additional 95 “Internal” issues that were not mentioned in the lists above but are also folded in?  Pretty incredible!

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