Iterate faster with Improved Cancelable Activities

Just the other day I was working on a side project. As we sometimes tend to do, I began on the production branch thinking to myself, “I’ll move this to the feature branch before I push”. Of course, as we tend to do, I forgot that I was working from the production branch and git push’ed—triggering a production deployment. I’d have loved to be able to abort that deployment at that moment.

We all love our coffee breaks, but we don’t necessarily want to be forced to take them. That’s why we’ve introduced Improved Cancelable Activities—a solution to spending less time waiting on deployments, crons, and source operations and more time delivering a reliable product.

Before we dive into the details, if you’re a tinkerer and not a reader you can start exploring the feature right away via the Platform CLI or the Project Activity dashboard in Console, as demonstrated in the image below.

Platform CLI:

platform activity:cancel

Project Activity Dashboard

You’re more the reading type? Great! Let’s discuss why Improved Cancelable Activities matter.

Iterative Project Onboarding

Many people start a Platform.sh project from a premade template, which doesn’t require much to figure out. But when you create a Platform.sh project with an unfamiliar framework, it can take a few loops until you get the configuration right. And some builds are going to be slower than others (spoiler: Rust support is coming—and we love Rust—but Rust is not always the quickest to build). Being able to launch a build, see how it behaves, then cancel, adjust, and start again can save you quite a bit of time in those initial steps.

Preventing the “Oops!” of automated code updates

Source Operations are a great way to automate code updates within your applications.

That said, we’ve seen situations in the past where source operations are triggered inadvertently by a developer, resulting in a premature code update. Before, you had to let the code deploy, and then work quickly to revert the change from production. But that’s no longer the case. Now, from the CLI or Console, you’re free to cancel the activity immediately and celebrate that your agenda for the day is still intact.

Now, go! Reclaim your productivity!! 

To summarize, here’s what you can expect to be able to cancel from Improved Cancelable Activities:

• Pending Activities: Any activity in the Pending Activity queue. 
• Deployments that execute the build hook: Any activity that requires the build hook to run and has not yet completed the build hook.
• Crons: Pending and in progress.
• Source Operations: Pending and in progress.

At Platform.sh, we know how important it is for developers to optimize productivity and streamline their workflows. That’s why we released Improved Cancelable Activities— to help developers stay on track and deliver by reducing time spent waiting on deployment blockers. 

If you have been blocked by an activity in the past, please celebrate this feature by sharing and commending the Platform.sh engineering team in our #platformsh Slack channel over at chat.platform.sh.

And, please visit next.platform.sh to continue giving us your feedback so that we can continue providing more improvements and upgrades!