Happy Friday! This week, we rolled out a long awaited improvement to the platform, this one is going to be a fun read.
Proxy++
TL:DR We’ve reduced the time it takes for deployments to become live from 3 minutes to just 10-20 seconds! 🚀😱
This should help restore our “Zero Downtime Default” state of application deploys
The core fix ended up being a simple Envoy configuration change to disabled CPU-intensive stats collection on our tens of thousands of proxy routes. However, figuring this out and making the change in a zero-downtime way was a multi-week effort.
Since we knew the effort would be large, we took the time to also:
- increase scaleability by adding multiple Envoy proxies behind a TCP load balancer,
- increase reliability by automatically removing unhealthy Envoy instances,
- increase observability by adding helpful DataDog graphs,
- increase iteration speed by testing new configs with canary Envoy instances, and
- increase consistency by defining it all in Terraform.
Our public proxy is one of the most important parts of our infrastructure and we’re proud to have it back in a dependable state.
Starter Content Links
Everything else on this changelog pales in comparison to the above but we feel it’s key to note.
The team thinks deeply about how we give our user’s easy access to guides and relevant information about how to use the platform. We have now added relevant setup guides in a few starters within the starter grid, helpful for involved starters that require multiple steps to setup.
New Remix Starter
In honor of the launch of Remix Stacks we added a starter for... you guessed it, Remix! We maybe shouldn’t have spoiled it with the heading text.
Redeploy Remix via our new template links system: https://dev.new/template/remix
(ooo and ahh at that URL!)
Improvements and Fixes
- Fixed a broken link within the platform
- Held a viking funeral some dead code