2024 Mid-March Glitch Madness: an explanation on frequent project restarts as we update containers

Hey y’all; cori from the Glitch Engineering team here with an update on our ongoing and upcoming platform work. Briefly, for the next few weeks projects will be changing hosts more often, which means more frequent restarts, including for Glitch Pro projects.

Folks who’ve been with us for a while or use Glitch more than superficially know that we’re long overdue to make some significant updates and In the coming months we have a lot of other “big” plans. A consistent process for keeping the project container up-to-date is within reach, and changes to the platform that will help us conserve our resources for folks to build and discover the the good web are under way. This is all in service of freeing us up to do make more community-focused changes soon thereafter, and we’re super excited about it!

We’re busy (sort of wildly busy) right now laying the groundwork for those next big steps. This means working on some technical debt in how we manage our fleet and the containers that run on it which has remained largely unchanged since … well, 2017. Resolving that, in turn, means a lot of churn in the fleet in the coming weeks while we clear out some messes and get ourselves in better running trim - we’ll be replacing the entire fleet of servers that host projects several more times before we’re in a state to have a more regular, stable cadence.

What that means, in turn, is that projects will be moving around more often for the next few weeks. A lot more, unfortunately, and each of those moves is itself a restart.

This week in particular has been bumpy as we dealt with what appears to be some external activity that’s been buffeting Glitch while we’re in the middle of the first of these changes. As a result we’re working hard to mitigate the impact of the upcoming fleet updates, and we’re hopeful future changes will be less disruptive. We apologize for that instability and the bother it’s been causing. Better things are on the way but we have some rough water to get through together first.

Cheers!

12 Likes