Changelog 10th December 2020

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Welcome to the Cloud 66 Changelog. These are the changes that have gone out this month:

Announcing Multi Database Support

We are very happy to announce the release of Multi Database, our latest feature. Multi Database lets you attach multiple groups of databases to your applications! These groups can be of different types, or the same type, depending on your needs.

We've been working on this feature for a while, and we are pretty excited about it. It allows for a variety of compelling use-cases:

• Running multiple databases in Rails 6
• Running different replicated versions of a database
• Easily switching target database groups for your application
• …and more!

If you're interested in this feature, check out the blog announcement and our Multi Database documentation.

Metadata Endpoint Deployment Information

The server metadata endpoint now reports the version of your code that has been deployed. To use this in your own workflows, you can use curl and jq to extract the relevant bits of information you need. Check out some workflow examples in our help documentation!

Maestro Startup Health Checks

You can now use startup health checks in your Maestro application service configurations. This applies the underlying Kubernetes "startupProbe" configuration to your workloads. Note that this will only be applied on applications running Kubernetes v1.16 or greater.

For more about this health check type, and when to use it, please see our health check documentation.

Rake & Server Job Run User

We now allow you to run your rake tasks and/or server jobs as the nginx user (optionally). This is particularly useful for when you need to create files or assets to be consumed by your web application (as your web application runs as the nginx user). For more about these please see our rake job and server job documentation.

Environment Variable Audit Records

All environment variable names are now listed in the audit record of their change. Previously, only the change was mentioned in the audit record without listing the names of the environment variables that were changed. This is now implemented to provide more clarity.

Scale Up UI Improvements

We are continuing to make UX improvements to the scale-up user interface. Replacing our older "modal style" overlays with our "drawer component". The additional vertical space available allows us to make further improvements to the usability of our forms, keeping them in line with the most recent form design guidelines.

Let us know what you think when you next scale up a server!

Out of Beta Projects:

Thanks to the feedback from our Beta Program members last month we have released bunch of feature to the general availability:

Archived Application

This feature allows developers to "park" their application at any time. For more information check out our blog.

Tag Propagation

This feature allows developers to easily identify and link components between your Cloud 66 account and supported cloud provider platforms. Check out our blog for more details.

Support for AWS IAM Instance Profiles

With this feature you will be able to set specific roles on new servers that they spin up with AWS. Read more about it on our blog.

Bring Your Own Images (BYOI) for Rails

Bring Your Own Images (BYOI) allows developers to spin up new servers for the applications that are based on custom server images rather than on a generic Ubuntu server. Head to our blog to learn more.

If you would like to join our Beta Program, head to your Account page and check the box for Beta Program.

Introducing Watchman

Watchman is a self-hosted web service that checks the health of an HTTP(S) endpoint remotely. It is intended to run as a light, multi-instance service in different geographical locations to provide a full picture of an endpoint's health and accessibility.

Watchman can easily be deployed as a "serverless" function (via AWS Lambda or GCP Cloud Run) for full geographical distribution, access to high quality network and cost effective monitoring. Read more in our blog announcement.