JetRails AutoPilot Update
Sit back and enjoy the latest news from the JetRails AutoPilot team! As is the trend today, we release several times a year with each release stacking up important new features, bug fixes and enhancements. Expect jaw-dropping additions with nearly every drop. But rest easy—we’re just as committed to keeping things steady, ensuring your existing setups hum along without a glitch.
A Rock-Solid Foundation for Your App
At AutoPilot, we’re all about giving your web app a dependable, future-proof home. Keep your packages fresh and reboot servers when critical kernel updates land—that’s it! We want you here for the long term.
Exciting new features are only available to newly provisioned deployments, while existing releases are locked in for long-term reliability. Of course, we quietly backport critical bug fixes to keep your app performing flawlessly (more on that below).
What’s New in This Update?
This release tackles 67 issues in our tracker, loaded with new features, slick enhancements, updates and bug fixes. We’ll skip the techy deep dive and spotlight the boldest, most exciting changes!
Here is the TLDR:
- Patching system for existing Deployments
- Partnership Program
- Unlimited SSH Keys
- End of standard support for Amazon Aurora MySQL version 3.05
- OPCache Not Working for Shopware
- PSR-0 Speed-Up for Magento Admin
- Downgrading MySQL To Earlier Release
Without further delays, lets dive in!
NEW FEATURES
Patching System
To keep your deployment secure, our team sometimes needs to apply critical bug fixes, or “patches.” Since these updates can occasionally require a service or server reboot, we wanted to give you a simple way to manage that process.
We’re excited to introduce Scheduled Maintenance Windows! This new section in AutoPilot lets you define specific, pre-approved time slots when our admins have the green light to roll in fixes.
Because your development site might operate on a different schedule than your live one, you can set a unique window for each individual deployment. This is perfect for teams working across different time zones.
The result? Faster, seamless patching with less back-and-forth, all on your schedule.
For example, here is what we have for the JetRails Swag Store:
Once this window is defined, you will be able to see available “Patches”, read their description, and Approve or Deny their application.
Once the patch is approved and our team applies it to your Deployment, the status will look like this:
We think this new patch system is a true game-changer. In the past, coordinating every bugfix with each customer over support tickets was effective, but it wasn’t always efficient.
Now, we have a powerful, systematic way to ensure important changes are applied consistently and tracked throughout the entire lifecycle of your deployment. This gives you a clear and predictable history of every update made.
It’s a huge step forward in providing stable, transparent and reliable service. We believe beautiful change control leads to beautiful results, and we’re thrilled to bring this new level of organization to you.
Partnership System Integration
Hurray! The JetRails Partnership Program has been integrated into AutoPilot! This application helps our partners to submit and keep a record of new contacts, potential opportunities and finalized agreements that result from introductions, as well as any benefits that may come out of it. Your JetRails Partner manager will be reaching out to show you the new platform.
EHANCEMENTS
Unlimited SSH Keys
There is a myth that Bill Gates said about RAM, that “640K ought to be enough for anybody”, which he has repeatedly denied. On a similar thread, we thought that a reasonable upper bound of SSH keys was 10. Well, our users proved us wrong by trying to jam more SSH keys into some deployments. We hear you, we understand you, and you’ll soon be able to use unlimited number of SSH keys. This feature is coming in the next couple of weeks. Normally these ChangeLogs messages talk about features that already rolled out but this is so important to so many people that we wanted to stay ahead of the curve and let you know it’s coming really soon!
PSR-0 Speed-Up for Magento Admin
Turns out that the long deprecated PHP Standard Recommendation (PSR) Rule 0 is still in use by some extension vendors. This causes undue stress on clusters by slowing down the uncached Magento Admin. The ideal case is of course to fix the code, but that’s farther up the stack and so we have an enhancement to work around it.
If you feel that your Magento Admin is sluggish, it might be due to PSR-0. Reach out to our support team and we’ll be happy to implement the change to make things lightning fast.
BUG FIXES
OPCache Not Working for Shopware
We discovered that Shopware was not acting as expected and tracked it down to a PHP OPCache configuration. This change has been rolled in and Viola! new deployments are shockingly fast once again. This type of bug fix would not normally make it into this high impact list but the difference is so dramatic that we wanted to draw your attention to it.
OTHER/MISC
End of standard support for Amazon Aurora MySQL version 3.05
Customers with older deployments using AWS Aurora for MySQL have been upgraded from version 3.05.x to a more recent version to stay ahead of EOL. Point releases are generally harmless but upgrading between minor versions has been known to cause issues in the past. JetRails team worked with customers to make sure the upgrade went smoothly during a service window. Currently all customers have been rolled up.
Downgrading MySQL To Earlier Release
Sometimes our customers need to launch a version of MySQL that is no longer supported. We don’t judge. But also, we don’t support this out-of-the-box since it’s pretty rare. However, when you need it, you really need it, so we’ll help you to get it up and running. Reach out to support and we’ll be happy to help. We can help to reshape your deployment to make sure that it works for you out of the box.
FEEDBACK
We want your feedback! If there is something that would make a great feature for AutoPilot, or at least would lower your level of annoyance, let us know! We love to hear from our users and have a direct User to Development feedback pipeline.
