A look back on 2017

Time flies. It's been quite a year for Platform.sh as our product continues to improve. One of the great things about a managed services product is that it can continually improve without you even realizing it. The sign of a successful product feature is that it feels like it's always been there. Who can imagine life without it?

Let's take a look at what we've improved just in the last 12 months...

January opened with support for HTTP/2 on all projects. HTTP/2 changes the way browsers and servers communicate, making it faster, more streamlined, and better tailored to modern, asset-heavy web sites. HTTP/2 "just works" automatically as long as you're using a reasonably modern browser and HTTPS.

And as of April, you're using HTTPS. Courtesy of Let's Encrypt, you now get a free, automatic SSL certificate provisioned for every environment. No one should have to think about HTTPS in 2017. It's just a part of the package.

April also saw the launch of our tiered CDN for Platform.sh Enterprise. The Global CDN combines a flexible, high-feature CDN for dynamic pages with a low-cost, high-bandwidth CDN for static assets. That offers the best of both worlds for sites that want the best performance for the least cost.

We've also continued to expand our available services. We kicked off the year with support for persistent Redis as a key/value store rather than just as a cache server. March saw the addition of InfluxDB, a popular time-series data service for recording time-based data. In June, we added support for Memcached in case Redis doesn't do it for you.

We also beefed up the functionality of our existing services, adding support for multiple-core Solr configurations and multi-database MySQL configurations. We even now support regular expressions in the router for more fine-grained cookie control.

And of course we've kept up with the latest releases of your favorite languages, be that Python, Ruby, NodeJS, or perennial favorite PHP 7.2. We even added preliminary support for Go and Java, both of which are in beta now. (Interested in trying them out? Please reach out to us!)

August included support for arbitrary worker processes in their own container. That allows an application to easily spin up a background task to handle queue processing, image generation, or other out-of-band tasks with just a few lines of YAML with no impact on production responsiveness.

As of October, we've added health notification support for all projects. At the moment they only cover disk usage, but in time will expand to other health notices. (If you haven't configured them on your project yet we strongly recommend you do so.)

We're also closing out the year with new support for GitLab, as well as more flexible control over TLS and Client TLS, plus a few other changes that line us up for even bigger things in the year to come.

Last but not least, all of that goodness is available down under as of July with our new Sydney region for Platform.sh Professional.

And that's all been just this year! What do we have coming in 2018 to further redefine "modern hosting"?

You'll just have to join us in 2018 to find out...