This morning’s system update went well :-)
There aren’t any major visible new features in the new system – it was primarily an infrastructural change. The operating system on our underlying servers has been upgraded from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 (so we had to rewrite all of our upstart system jobs as systemd ones, which was… fun). The sandboxes where your code runs have been kept as Ubuntu 14.04, so that your code doesn’t break due to the system it runs on changing unexpectedly.
A future update, hopefully soon, will enable a 16.04-based system image that you’ll be able to opt in to use when it’s convenient to you. There’s also a big new feature that we’re working on that required the OS upgrade – more about that another time…
There were a few minor changes beyond that:
- We’ve increased the server capacity available for scheduled tasks.
- We’ve significantly reworked the system for logging of error messages for web apps, so they should appear pretty much instantly in your error logs rather than being delayed – previously they could sometimes take 30 seconds to arrive, which could make debugging frustrating.
- We’ve been working on improving the API; there’s some documentation here. The API is still in early alpha, and may change without warning, but if you’d like to have a play, just let us know and we can switch it on for your account.
- A couple of security fixes – mostly rate-limiting things that send email so that they can’t be abused by trolls trying to fill up your inbox with junk. A shout-out to akash c for reporting that.