Existing VPCs, NAT Gateways, and Infrastructure Improvements

Existing VPCs

You can now create a Rack in an existing VPC during convox install (#946) [@beedub]

$ convox install --existing-vpc vpc-12345678 \
  --vpc-cidr=10.0.0.0/16 --subnet-cidrs=10.0.1.0/24,10.0.2.0/24,10.0.3.0/24

NAT Gateways

This release contains some fixes to move NAT Gateways for Private Racks from a custom CloudFormation resource (Custom::EC2NatGateway) implemented by Convox over to the native AWS::EC2::NatGateway as part of continued efforts to reduce custom handlers in Convox. (#968)

WARNING: The IP addresses of your NAT Gateways will change when you upgrade to this release. If you have whitelisted these IP addresses anywhere you will need to take note of your new IP addresses.

Infrastructure Improvements

We have finalized a massive internal refactoring that greatly simplifies generation of CloudFormation templates. Hats off to @awsmsrc and @MiguelMoll for this massive simplification of Rack! (#939)

• Many custom CloudFormation resources have been removed for their native counterparts
• The code for building images in development and production has been unified
• Multiple fixes for convox start bugs around sub-projects and code sync
• Removed the internal registry when ECR is available
• Rack templates should now boot faster and more reliably thanks to better dependency mapping
• Removed several unused Rack-level CloudFormation parameters

20160802145358: Merge pull request #968 from convox/existing-private-fix

Fix upgrade for existing private-mode Racks

20160801140250: Merge pull request #957 from convox/cert-random

Stability updates for CI

General Enhancements

Fluentd

The recently released fluentd service was iterated on further, making it that much better!
See PR #917 for more information

Bug fixes

• Bug fixes for convox run (PR #915)
  • The CLI returns a proper error message when an app is not found if the --detach flag is specified.
  • Fixed a silent error when specifying a release that doesn't have any environment settings. (Thanks to @beedub for the debug help!)
• Delete builds in the background one at a time (PR #900)
  • Fixes issue #855
• Include a timeout in the build logic (PR #898)
  • Default timeout for a build has been set to one hour. This could change in the future.

Revert Existing VPC Changes

A problem was found with the existing VPC changes so they are being reverted temporarily in this release.

Existing VPCs, Fluentd, and More

Existing VPCs

You can now create a Rack in an existing VPC during convox install (#837) [@ddollar]

$ convox install --existing-vpc vpc-12345678 --existing-subnets=10.0.1.0/24,10.0.2.0/24,10.0.3.0/24

Fluentd

You can now stream your logs to fluentd by adding a service. (#893) [@adamenger]

$ convox services create fluentd --url=tcp://fluentd-collector.example.com:24224

General Enhancements

• Pad the uploading progress to remove artifacts (#890) [@MiguelMoll]
• Warn about multiple missing env vars during convox start (#886) [@awsmsrc]
• Support convox run on unpromoted releases (#860) [@MiguelMoll]

Django Support and General Enhancements

Django Support

Convox now detects Django applications during convox init and writes appropriate Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml (#873) [@ianmalott]

General Enhancements

• convox start has been refactored to dedupe with production pathway (#768) [@awsmsrc]
• Builds now show upload progress (#858) [@MiguelMoll]
• Bugfix around updating logging services (#870) [@adamenger]
• Improve build logs stability (#874) [@MiguelMoll]
• Typo fixes (#881) [@adamenger]
• Update friendly names for CloudFormation resources during install (#884) [@ddollar]

Health Check and Instance Autoscaling Configuration

Much thanks to @beedub for two great PRs adding some powerful configuration options to Convox!

Health Check Configuration

You can now configure the health checks for your Convox apps using additional labels in your docker-compose.yml (#772)

labels:
  - convox.health.port=443
  - convox.health.path=/ping
  - convox.health.timeout=30
ports:
  - 443:5000

Autoscaling Parameters

You can now set the InstanceUpdateBatchSize to configure the rate at which new instances are rolled into your Convox Rack during updates.

convox rack params set InstanceUpdateBatchSize=3

EFS Volumes and General Enhancements

EFS Volumes

Convox now supports shared volume mounts via EFS. Any Convox process can now share files with other processes of the same type by declaring shared volumes in the volumes: section of docker-compose.yml. (#822)

See the Volumes doc for more details.

General Enhancements

• Container disk size is now configurable with the ContainerDisk app parameter. (#854)
• convox start code synchronization now works with single file COPY. (#853)
• convox install will now use the AWS CLI for authentication if it is available. (#847)
• Convox now terminates instances using the AutoScaling API rather than terminating directly. Thanks to @mwarkentin (#865)

Critical Log Reliability Improvements

This update adds critical resiliency improvements to the Convox logging pipeline.

Recently we discovered that convox/agent 0.69 could panic due to a concurrency bug. When this happened, the agent would be restarted and another bug prevented log collection from running containers.

This update fixes both issues. See convox/agent#26 for more details.