---
title: "Template Health, DDoS Event, Product Engineering Spotlight, Plugin Deprecation"
date: 2024-02-02
number: 0171
url: https://railway.com/changelog/2024-02-02-template-health
---

# Template Health, DDoS Event, Product Engineering Spotlight, Plugin Deprecation

Hello to those of you reading this changelog with your brand new [Apple Vision Pro goggles](https://x.com/Railway/status/1753611569651466714?s=20).

To the rest of you, please put on whatever ski, swim, chemistry, woodworking, or mountaineering goggles you might have lying around the house — we wouldn’t want you to feel left out.

The show is about to begin, we wish you a pleasant journey. 

Let’s go!

## Improved Template Metrics

[Image: Templates now provide more information about health and deployment numbers]

Let’s talk about [Templates](https://docs.railway.app/guides/publish-and-share). 

A template is a fully configured project that’s meant to work out of the box … but what if it doesn’t work? 

After all, we’re [approaching 500 templates](https://railway.app/templates) and they can’t all be winners. 

We’re busy making tools to increase the trustworthiness and reliability of templates. In particular, we’ve recently added a health score to each template that takes into account recent successful or unsuccessful deployments.

We’ve also made it more clear how popular the template is and what you’ll be getting from the template. Best of all, this is all available now within the command palette (⌘ + K) in the Railway application.

We have lots more planned for templates soon. 

PS. Did you hear that we [recently crossed $10K](https://x.com/Railway/status/1752527755697430631?s=20) in payouts awarded to template creators through the [Template Kickback program](https://railway.app/open-source-kickback)?

Check it out!

## DDoS Events

[12M requests per second](https://blog.railway.app/p/2024-01-31-incident-report)! 

That’s what we experienced during the peak of a DDoS attack directed at us this past week.

As a cloud platform with a rapidly growing user base, we’re unfortunately a target for some occasional bad actors. This past week we experienced a number of sophisticated DDoS attacks that caused production outages for some users. 

These attacks were extreme in nature and although they resulted in some downtime (and lots of time spent hardening some things instead of shipping new features this past week), we think the [Incident Report](https://blog.railway.app/p/2024-01-31-incident-report) makes for a fascinating read.

We hope you’ll take a chance to read about how we treat events like these — it’s our policy always to share the public details of what occurred.

Meanwhile, thanks for your support.

Onward!

## Team Spotlight: Product Engineering

Want to learn about some of the fine Product Engineers and Designers bringing you Railway? 

We’re rolling out a new blog series this week to do just that.

Check out the [Team Spotlight blogpost](https://blog.railway.app/p/team-spotlight-product-engineering) to learn about one of the most important teams at Railway — the Product Engineering team! 

We hope you enjoy a little bit of an inside look at how we operate. If you like what you read, [we hope you’ll consider joining us](https://railway.app/careers).

See ya!

## Plugin Deprecation

As planned, we’ve started [shutting down legacy Plugins](https://docs.railway.app/guides/database-migration-guide). 

Due to the DDoS events this past week, we’ve extended the final Plugin deprecation date to [February 23, 2024](https://docs.railway.app/guides/database-migration-guide#migration-timeline).

If you do not migrate before then, your running plugins will be archived for 6 months, after which they will be permanently deleted. 

Locked plugins (stopped because they ran out of credits) will *not* be archived. They will be deleted permanently on February 23, 2024. 

For full timeline and details, check out the [Migration Guide](https://docs.railway.app/guides/database-migration-guide#migration-timeline).

## Fixes and Improvements

- We fixed an issue where connections on internal private networks would “blip”
- We improved a number of automated emails around usage limits and failed build notifications
- We fixed a bug in which deleted services would sometimes appear in Staged Changes
- We made some improvements to the [Help](https://railway.app/help) page
- We fixed an issue where team members sometimes couldn’t edit templates