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!

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.

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.

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'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.

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!