With Black Friday and Cyber Monday behind us, let’s debrief and reflect on how this critical weekend went for JetRails’ clients running on AutoPilot.
In a word, it was smooth!
Here’s why: Some customers pre-scaled their deployments vertically by adding CPU and RAM, while others grew horizontally by adding more web servers. And some stores went both vertical and horizontal. They could do this because AutoPilot makes these tasks easy! Where it used to take a team of people days to upgrade, scaling can now be done in a matter of minutes, and usually without any downtime.
We’ll talk more about this in a future post but for now, back to our regularly-scheduled program to showcase the latest AutoPilot changes. Many of these features are already live; some will be live in the coming weeks.
Since our last update in September our development team has been maxing out productivity to deliver changes in time for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday code freeze.
The result is too many individual changes to list, so we’ll just highlight the most high-impact items:
Overview page now looks more fun! (p#135)
We were getting tired of the clinical and efficient look of AutoPilot and have started to add visual goodies. For instance, the SSH “card” in Overview now looks like the terminal. Click it to copy the full command so you don’t have to type anything in the terminal. Click and paste.
- Here is the updated “Deployment” → “Overview” tab:
And here is a zoom-in of the “SSH Access” card. Kind of looks like a terminal window, right? See what happens when you click on the text.
Added Visual Studio Code for Web Editor to Each Deployment (ajc#310)
This is pretty cool! You can now open a fully-featured IDE directly on the hosted platform. Absolutely everything about this is amazing and we have had incredible feedback so far, but what most users miss is that you now have a web-based terminal for immediate troubleshooting!
Preview domains are live! (ajc#309)
This feature, commonly known as “Temporary Domain,” has been in development for some time! Every hosting deployment now has a scrambled domain name which cannot be easily guessed. This allows you to inspect your code without having to point DNS to the new load balancer. One thing to keep in mind is that you need to configure your app to use this temporary domain name as the store name. We do this automatically on all new deployments so that you can visit it on the web and log into Admin as soon as provisioning is complete. Boom.
User Profiles Now Have SSH Key Public Key Input
Once the user adds their key into their profile settings, it can be added to each deployment without having to copy and paste every time!
Import and export for IP address whitelists! (a#252)
Look for “Import” and “Export” buttons in the “Deployment → Security” tab.
New Maximum Number of Auto-Scaling Nodes (act#141)
Although the default maximum auto-scaling nodes is still set to 10 servers, you can now raise this limit up to 30 nodes if desired. For cost containment we recommend keeping it at 10 and only raising the limit if needed. Most customers who consider adding more than 10 auto-scaling servers should probably grow vertically by doubling their CPU and RAM. But for some unique circumstances it may be useful to be able to set the limit higher, and now you can!
Alerts Have a Different Look (p#130)
Please pay attention to alerts and what we lovingly call “Nag messages” on the “Deployment → Overview” page. We get annoyed easily ourselves and only ask for your attention when absolutely necessary. For example, if there is a service update and we can’t proceed without your approval.
Revised and Simplified Invoices with Tax and VAT Line (a#251)
Updates to OpenSearch (v3.2) and Varnish (v7.7) (ajc#313)
New default versions for provisioning (ajc#313)
– Magento v2.4.8.2
– Shopware 6.6.10.04 (Downgraded from 6.7.2.x by user demand)
– WordPress 6.8.2
IonCube is Pre-installed but Disabled. (ajc#292)
This is a minor thing but now it’s there out of the box just waiting to be enabled. You can do this any time by modifying the config files and reloading php-fpm.
That’s all for now. It’s quite a lot actually!
If you have a feature that you would like to see, be sure to mention it to us through our contact form or emailing your account representative, or even just mention it to our wonderful Support Team.
Or send us a homing pigeon, whatever!
Happy holidays!
