Hey everyone! We're almost done building out a new Render changelog to create a home for all of our platform news. Our last few updates have been email-only (subscribe here if you haven't), but moving forward we'll also add any new entries here until the new changelog goes live. When that happens, we'll let you know!

In the meantime, here's our December update:

Log explorer + HTTP logs

There's a powerful new tool for searching and filtering service logs right from your dashboard:

Use the explorer to search your logs for an arbitrary string, filter by log level, and click to view any result in its original context.

With a team account, you can also view logs for every incoming HTTP request to your web services.

See the blog post, or try out the explorer in your dashboard.

New default language versions

If an app doesn't specify a version for its programming language, Render uses its default version for that language. We'll be the first to admit that some of those defaults were getting…a little stale.

To freshen things up, we've been updating language defaults for new services over the last few weeks. Here are the changes:

• Node.js: 14.17.0 → 20.9.0
• Ruby: 2.6.8 → 3.2.2
• Elixir: 1.9.4 → 1.15.6
• Python: 3.7.10 → 3.11.6 (this one's rolling out right now)

Much better! 😌

A couple items to note:

• These are Render's new default language versions. You can always specify a different version for your app.
• These updates are for newly created services. Existing services keep their original defaults to prevent breaking changes.

Early access for High Availability PostgreSQL

We're getting ready to release High Availability (HA) support for Render PostgreSQL databases. With HA enabled, Render can automatically fail over to a standby instance of your database if the primary instance becomes unavailable.

HA will be available for team accounts and will support Pro database instances and higher. Right now, we're running a closed early access period to ensure a smooth rollout. If your team is interested in enabling HA, fill out this form to apply for early access. Note that we can't guarantee a response to every application.

Have a restful holiday ❄️

Happy Friday! This week, we've been focused on planning for H2 and making progress on several in-flight projects, so we have nothing new to announce.

That said, we wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some key roles that are open on our team.

Our Datastores team is growing!

We're looking to hire an Engineering Manager and a Senior Backend Engineer. If you have a deep specialization in databases and an intuition for excellent developer experience, please reach out! We'd love to meet you.

We're also hiring across Product and Design

We recently announced three new roles on our Product team. We're looking to hire experienced PMs to focus on product-led growth, evolving Render's platform and core developer experience, and supporting Render's largest customers.

If you or someone you know is an incredible, developer-oriented PM, please reach out to our team!

Check out our careers page for additional roles.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Happy Friday (and Happy Bastille Day to our French developers)! We had a huge launch this week at Render, so let's jump in.

Point-in-Time Recovery for Postgres is now available!

With Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) enabled for your Postgres database, Render archives your data continuously. If unexpected data loss occurs, you can restore to a new database seeded with data from archives saved before the data loss occurred.

PITR is available on Team, Enterprise, and Organization plans for Pro database instance types and above. Learn more on our blog.

Cancel deploys via the REST API

In other news, we've added our newest deploy management feature — the option to cancel a deploy — to the REST API. This new endpoint may be helpful if your team uses a third-party CI/CD tool to manage deploys with Render's deploy hooks. Learn more in our docs.

Render is hiring!

If you love building apps on Render and are looking for a new opportunity, Render is hiring across Engineering, Product, and Design. Check out our open roles.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

We spent the week working hard on upcoming releases, so our update is short and sweet.

Small wins we shipped this week

• Set preferred Poetry version Customers using Python native environments can now use a POETRY_VERSION environment variable to specify the version of Poetry they wish to have installed. Learn more.
• Deploying from external registries We addressed several bugs in the Early Access feature. As a reminder, you can try deploying containers from external registries by enabling the feature in Settings
• Errors for bad start commands If you configure an invalid start command, you'll now see an error in the logs and on the events page

• New logging for slow queries We now log when a query takes longer than 2s so that you have more data to help debug slow app performance.

Reminder: Updates to our build retention policy for Instant Rollbacks

Starting on July 5, 2023, we will retain builds only for the most recent deploys of Render services. Based on historical data, this change will not affect most users. The number of builds retained will vary based on plan.

Find more detail under Instant Rollbacks on our pricing page.

Happy long weekend to everyone in America! See you next Friday!

We're posting an off-schedule Changelog update to share that Render has achieved a significant milestone. Read on to learn more!

Render's $50 million Series B

This week, we announced that Render raised a $50 million Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners. This new round of funding empowers us to continue to build toward our vision of making cloud infrastructure management a thing of the past and ushering in a new era of developer productivity.

Learn more about our story on Insider, Techcrunch, and our blog.

Projects are now available for all teams

Projects are now available for all developers on the Team, Organization, and Enterprise plans. You can use projects to organize your app’s services, making managing and collaborating with your team easier. Learn more on our blog here.

Updates to our build retention policy for Instant Rollbacks

Starting on July 5, 2023, we will retain builds only for the most recent deploys of Render services. Based on historical data, this change will not affect most users. The number of builds retained will vary based on plan.

Find more detail under Instant Rollbacks on our pricing page.

Cancel deploys, Errors for failed on-off jobs, and more

We've also shipped a ton of small wins over the last week.

• Cancel deploys You asked, and we listened. If a deploy was triggered by accident or isn't going as anticipated, click the new Cancel button, and your service will remain as-is
• Show errors for failed one-off jobs Now, if a one-off job fails, we publish a meaningful error that should help make debugging easier
• New Trust Center If you need to request Render's SOC 2 report or learn more about our security and compliance posture, all of this is now available self-serve in our new Trust Center
• Doc updates We added a new section to our Web Services article explaining how host and port configurations work. We also updated the Free Instance Types article to better explain free-tier limitations

That's it for this week! As always, please let us know how we can improve Render for you. Thank you for choosing Render!

We're taking this week off updating the changelog as we make some updates on our end. You'll hear from us next week.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

ICYMI

Projects is still available in Early Access You can now organize your services by app and deployment to make building and managing services much easier.Access projects today by navigating to Settings and opting into Early Access. Available on the Team plan and above.

Get access to PITR and pgvector If you're still waiting to use point-in-time recovery or pgvector, please contact Support. You'll need to run maintenance on your database to access these features if it was created before March 27, 2023, for PITR, or April 15, 2023, for pgvector.

Happy Friday! This week, we've delivered major improvements to support our platform's reliability and integrity, making things better for everyone building on Render. On to the update!

Improved resilience to DDoS attacks

Render's load balancers are shared by multiple services, helping us handle our rapidly growing scale efficiently. With this update, we're introducing improved domain-level rate limiting to better isolate DDoS attacks. While we also have other DDoS prevention measures in place, this change improves how we prevent attacks from affecting unrelated services.

Bugfix for the native Python environment to allow installation of specific packages like Poetry

One of our customers wrote a script for installing a specific Poetry version on their instance, which uncovered an issue with installing packages that rely on specific locations for shared libraries. We fixed the issue this week, so other developers can try it too! We plan to make the process even easier by supporting a POETRY_VERSION variable similar to PYTHON_VERSION.

Faster, more reliable propagation of changes to custom domains

We are currently rolling out a change to significantly reduce the variance in the time it takes for custom domains to propagate across our global load-balancing infrastructure. The changes bring this variance down to O(seconds) instead of O(minutes). We will finish rolling it out early next week, and it should have the most noticeable impact on our Singapore and Frankfurt regions.

Improved reliability for logs

We finished rolling out an architecture change that removed a big moving part in how we stream logs to customer endpoints. This should lead to even more reliable logging going forward, especially as we continue to scale usage.

We also shipped several automations to block abusive services, making our engineers happier and more productive!

That's it! Have a great weekend!

Happy Friday! We've shipped fixes for two common pain points this week.

Easily find the runtime version used for apps running on native environments

Sometimes developers who use Render's native environments for building their apps end up using the incorrect runtime version. Since we didn't publish the runtime version, it took time for developers to figure out why their app didn't work. Developers can now see the version of the runtime their app is using and get just-in-time guidance to change it if it's not what their app needs.

Learn more about Native Environments support in our docs here.

Change the credentials associated with a service

Teams often encounter another challenge when someone who sets up a service leaves their team. Since the developer's credentials remain associated with the service, the team can't deploy the service anymore.

Now, team members can change the credentials associated with any service, ensuring that development continues as the team evolves.

Have a great weekend!

We have lots of quality-of-life improvements to share this week!

Restart servers using our REST API

Last week, we shipped the ability to restart services without redeploying them. We've now added an API endpoint to do the same — more at https://api-docs.render.com/reference/restart-server.

Faster go-lives for deploys

Massive scale meant some deploys took much longer than we'd have liked to go live. Not anymore! We've rewritten things to make deploy go-lives up to 10x faster.

Improved reliability for PostgreSQL replicas

We've fixed a bizarre edge case where Postgres replicas can get 'stuck' and never catch up with the primary.

Search by service ID

You can now find services using service IDs.

ICYMI

Early Access: Deploy images from public and private registriesLast week, we introduced the ability to deploy container images directly in early access. You no longer need to wrestle with Dockerfiles, and deploys can be much faster using pre-built container images.

That's it for this week. Have a happy and safe Memorial Day weekend if you're in the US, and enjoy the Spring Bank Holiday in the UK!