Changelog

New Redis instances use version 6.2.14

As of 2024-03-11, all newly created Redis instances on Render use Redis version 6.2.14.

Instances created before this date used version 6.2.5. Render will upgrade these instances to 6.2.14 as part of their next scheduled maintenance.

Learn more about Redis on Render in the documentation.

Default Elixir version updated to 1.16.1

Newly created Elixir services now use Elixir 1.16.1 and Erlang/OTP 26.2.2 by default. You can always specify different versions.

Existing Elixir services keep their original default versions to prevent breaking changes.

Scalable disk-backed services now in early access

Now in early access, you can scale Render services that have an attached persistent disk. Enable this capability from your Account Settings or Team Settings page in the Render Dashboard:

Enabling disk-backed service scaling in the Render Dashboard

If you scale a disk-backed service, Render attaches a completely separate disk to each instance. This can result in data fragmentation for services that act as a centralized, non-distributed database.

Scaling is well suited for disk-backed services that use their disk as a standalone cache, where different instances can process independent jobs in parallel.

Learn more in the documentation.

Default Node.js version updated to 20.11.1

Newly created Node.js services now use Node.js 20.11.1 by default. You can always specify a different version.

Existing Node.js services keep their original default version to prevent breaking changes.

Default Python version updated to 3.11.8

Newly created Python services now use Python 3.11.8 by default. You can always specify a different version.

Existing Python services keep their original default version to prevent breaking changes.

PostgreSQL 16 now available for new Render PostgreSQL databases

Render now supports PostgreSQL version 16 for newly created databases. You select your database's version during the creation flow in the Render Dashboard.

If you have an existing database that you want to move to PostgreSQL 16, see Upgrading your PostgreSQL Version.

Enable high availability for large PostgreSQL databases

Teams with a database on a Pro instance type or higher can enable high availability (HA) for that database from the Render Dashboard.

When you enable HA, Render creates a standby instance of your database and automatically fails over to it if your primary instance encounters an issue.

Learn more in the blog post and documentation.

Add environment variables in bulk from a .env file

You can now bulk-add environment variables from your local .env file while creating or modifying a service or environment group.

Below any environment variable list in the Render Dashboard, click Add from .env:

Adding environment variables from a .env file in the Render Dashboard

Learn more in the documentation.

Patched Leaky Vessels container breakout vulnerabilities

On January 31, 2024, a set of four container breakout vulnerabilities was disclosed to the public. We have patched all of our affected systems following the recommendations included in the disclosure.

These patches are transparent to applications running on the platform. Render users should see no changes to their experience and do not need to take any corrective actions.

After a thorough audit of potential exploit vectors, we found no evidence that this impacted Render's internal systems or users' apps and data. We will continue to monitor our systems for irregularities or unexpected activity.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with our Support team at support@render.com.

Persistent disks migrated to new hardware

All disks attached to Render services (including PostgreSQL, Redis, and persistent disks for other service types) have been migrated to new hardware. Almost all services will observe improved read/write performance compared to previous hardware (especially for disks under 1 TB in size).

Restrict shared config to a single environment

Teams on Render can now restrict any environment group (a shared collection of environment variables and/or secret files) to a single project environment. This helps protect against accidentally connecting a staging service to a production database (or vice versa).

Learn more in the documentation.

Customize your service notifications

You can now customize:

• Which service events trigger notifications (such as deploy failures)
• Where those notifications go (email and/or Slack)
• Which services you receive notifications for

These settings help you stay informed about exactly the events that you care about most.

To start configuring your notifications, head to your Account Settings or Team Settings page in the Render Dashboard. For all the details, check out the blog post and documentation.

Search your logs with regex and wildcards

We've added support for regex and wildcard search to Render's new log explorer. Try out searches like these:

• /(request|response)/ - Find lines that mention at least one of request or response.
• /api/* - Find lines that mention a path that includes /api/.

See more examples in the documentation.

Updates to default language versions

We've updated the default language versions for several of our native runtimes. 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

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.

New 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.

Assign access roles to team members

Teams on Render now support two member roles: Admin and Developer. Only Admin members can perform organizational tasks like billing management, enforcement of 2FA, and inviting other team members.

For details, see the documentation.

Run migrations and other tasks with the pre-deploy command

Set a pre-deploy command for your service to run tasks (such as database migrations or asset uploads) right before a new version of your service goes live.

This command is particularly useful for services that deploy a prebuilt Docker image, because they can't fold these kinds of tasks into the build command.

For details, see the blog post and documentation.

Run builds with higher RAM and CPU

Teams on Render can now enable the Performance build pipeline, which runs all of your team's builds on compute with 8x the RAM and CPU of default build instances. If your builds are currently hitting a resource limit, the Performance pipeline provides a whole lot more headroom.

For details, see the blog post and documentation.

Skip an unnecessary pull request preview

Pull request previews help you and your team test out proposed changes, but some pull requests don't have any changes to test (like one that just updates a README).

In these cases, you can now include any of these strings in your pull request's title to tell Render not to generate a preview instance:

• [skip render]
• [skip preview]
• [render skip]
• [preview skip]

Deploy a prebuilt Docker image from a registry

Render can now pull and run a Docker image directly from your container registry. These new image-backed services can speed up your deploys significantly if you're currently building from source with a Dockerfile.

You can pull public images from any registry, along with private images from Docker Hub, GitHub, and GitLab.

For more information, see the blog post and documentation.

View service metrics for different time ranges

While viewing metrics for a web service or private service in the Render Dashboard, you can now choose from multiple time ranges. Zoom in on a hiccup from the last five minutes, observe broader trends from the past week, or go with something in between.

Add Datadog monitoring to existing Render PostgreSQL databases

You can now add your Datadog API key to an existing Render PostgreSQL database from the Render Dashboard. (Previously, integrating Datadog with an existing database required contacting Render support.)

Cancel deploys via Render's REST API

We've added our newest deploy management feature — the option to cancel a deploy — to the REST API. This new endpoint can help if your team uses a third-party CI/CD tool to manage deploys with Render's deploy hooks. Learn more in our docs.

PostgreSQL point-in-time recovery 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.

June 30, 2023 - Changelog

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!

June 21, 2023 - Changelog

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!

June 9, 2023 - Changelog

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!

Jun 2, 2023 - Changelog

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!

May 26, 2023 - Changelog

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 registries

Last 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!

May 19, 2023 - Changelog

This week, we're thrilled to share updates on features we know many in our developer community have been looking to see to give developers more flexible options for deploying and operating services on Render. Without further preamble, let's dive in!

New from Render

Now in Early Access: Deploy container images from external registries

Earlier this week, we introduced the option to deploy container images directly on Render. With this capability, you no longer need to wrestle with Dockerfiles and can take advantage of faster deploys.

All developers can deploy images from public registries, and developers on the Teams plan and above can integrate with private registries hosted on GitHub, GitLab, or Docker Hub.

Try deploying your own container image by enabling this feature in Settings.

Platform Improvements

Restart a web service Developers can now restart a web service any time by navigating to the service page in Render and finding the Restart service option in the Deploy menu.

Restart a database replica We've supported restart for databases for a while. However, now, as of this week, developers can also restart database replicas by navigating to database replica settings.

Render now supports 2-3x more websocket connections for a service Render's designed to support developers building nearly any type of app, so we're excited to share that apps using websockets will see improved reliability going forward.

Faster builds on the free tier Our infrastructure team recently completed a significant redesign of our free tier, resulting in increased reliability and faster builds. Under the hood, we replaced a rather complex combination of Knative and Istio with a custom solution in Go that does exactly what we want it to do and no more. We call it the Hibernate stack: it allows us to scale services to and from zero based on traffic and allows free services to share the same build and deploy constructs used by paid services. We'll share more details in a blog post soon.

Have a great weekend!

May 5, 2023 - Changelog

It's Friday, and you know what that means! Time for us to dig into all the work we shipped this week.

New from Render

Host a ChatGPT retrieval plugin on Render We created a Render Example you can use to get started with ChatGPT plugins, all on Render. You'll need early access to plugins to try it out, and you can join the OpenAI waitlist here.

Product updates

• Billing improvements You can now view your invoice immediately after the billing period ends, so you have clarity around your spending on Render all the time.
• External connections to Render Postgres now require TLS v1.2 or higher. You'll also need to use one of the cipher suites listed in our documentation to connect to your databases securely. Learn more here.

ICYMI

Projects 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.

April 28, 2023 - Changelog

Our team is focused on shipping a few new features and bringing our recent Early Access launches into GA, so this week's update is focused on a few critical small wins.

New Releases

Enforced 2FA 🔒 If you're running mission-critical production services on Render, ensuring your Render team is secure is crucial. Starting this week, all Render teams can now require team members to have two-factor authentication enabled on their accounts to access team resources.

Product Updates

Rust is now available in Python environments on Render!

We also shipped several minor bug fixes and updates, including a new label for database pages indicating your database instance's plan.

ICYMI

Projects in Early Access You can now organize your services by app and deployment to make building and managing services much easier.

Get access to projects today by navigating to Settings and opting into Early Access. Available on the Team plan and above.

Get early access to PITR and pgvector If you're still waiting to use point-in-time recovery or pgvector, please get in touch with 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.

PITR is available for the Pro plan and above databases on the Team plan or higher.

April 14, 2023 - Changelog

Hi there! We've got a short update for you this week, so we'll keep it brief.

Product Launches

• Projects was released in Early Access this week! You can now organize your services by app and deployment, making developing and managing services in Render more straightforward and delightful. You can get access to the Early Access feature, if you haven't already, in Settings

Feature Improvements

• pgvector is now available for new Postgres databases! pgvector is a Postgres extension allowing you to harness AI to build semantic search into your apps. Over the next couple of months, we'll roll out pgvector to existing databases so that everyone can try it out

Have a good weekend!

April 7, 2023 - Changelog

Hi there! It's the end of a productive week at Render, and we're excited to share this week's updates.

Product Launches

• Point-in-time Recovery is now available in Early Access! You can join the preview by navigating to Settings in the dashboard and finding the Early Access section. New databases on the Pro plan or higher, created after joining the Early Access program, will have the option to use PITR. You will be able to enable PITR for existing databases when the feature is generally available. Learn more here.

Feature Updates

• You can now configure a previewPlan type for Redis to allow preview environments to use a smaller Redis instance size.
• We now remember your last active team and switch to it when you log back into Render. 
• We've added links to service or deploy logs in service events to facilitate debugging when errors occur.
• Changes to instance types are now accurately represented in billing. So, if you change an instance type during a billing period, your bill will be easier to follow.
• We added support for Ruby Env versions 3.2.2, 3.1.4, 3.0.6 and 2.7.8 in native environments.

Bug Fixes

• We made some UI polish improvements throughout the dashboard and billing pages.

March 31, 2023 - Changelog

Rebooting our Changelog

Hi there! As of this week, we're relaunching our Changelog. Expect to see new updates here each week and sometimes in your email.

Here's the update for this week:

New Releases

• You can now change the repo connected to a service
• You can now regenerate the deploy hook URL for a service

Product Updates

• Added support for Python 3.11.2
• Updated log level in log streams to map to appropriate syslog priority. The default log severity level is now INFO instead of ALERT
• Added support for Sumo Logic as a log stream
• Added support for listing more than 100 branches for GitLab repositories
• Service events now display the user who triggered an instance type change

Bug Fixes

• Fixed the display of y-axis labels in metrics charts
• Added an instructive error message in Blueprint syncs if the repo cannot be accessed
• Clarified in the UI that service health checks are internal
• Started cleaning up Preview Environments when a PR is closed, even if Preview Environments aren't enabled
• Fixed an issue causing external Postgres connections to close unexpectedly

Docs Updates

• Updated the REST API docs to reflect monorepo support