Hello Bubble community,
Today, we’re excited to be launching a new feature: the ability to put your application on “scheduled releases” instead of immediate releases for changes to the Bubble platform. Applications on the Professional and Production[1] plans can find this setting in Settings → Versions.
What does this feature mean?
As an internet software company, the Bubble team releases code throughout the workday. After QA, deployments can happen at any time throughout the day, but in practice largely happen between the hours of 9 am and 4 pm ET.
It can be difficult to keep up with all the changes happening on Bubble: at-a-glance, in the past two weeks, there were 25–35 new deployments per week, or an average of 5–7 per business day.
Although our aim is to consistently improve the Bubble platform through each code release, this new feature might be appealing to users who don’t want the Bubble platform changing potentially multiple times throughout a workday.
Scheduled releases makes it so that customers’ applications get all of the previous day’s releases (if any) in one batch at 9 am ET (Eastern Time). These customers will not receive every update as it ships. Instead, if a customer opts into scheduled releases, they can know that the instances powering their application will only have new features released once per day, at a predictable time. This can make it easier to keep up with everything happening on Bubble.
(Note, however, that the Bubble team may still deploy any urgent bug fixes or infrastructure changes outside of the once-a-day schedule.)
What if I don’t opt in?
If you remain on the immediate release schedule, nothing will change for you. This is, and will remain, the standard way of building on Bubble.
What if I’m on a dedicated system?
The way dedicated customers upgrade their instance is not changing—but we’re formally calling it the “dedicated release” schedule.
Okay, I’m ready… how does this work?
Applications on the Professional or Production plan can toggle between immediate and scheduled release. After confirming your selection, your application will immediately switch tiers, including any live applications, API workflows, and your own editor session. (Other users’ editor sessions won’t reload, but their traffic will begin to get redirected to the other tier immediately.)
Note here that switching between versions is something that happens every time we deploy: a similar transition between code versions typically happens multiple times per day on the immediate tier. So in almost every case, the switch will be transparent.
Keep in mind though, that if you do toggle between release tiers, you may all of a sudden lose features that were rolled out that day, at least until the next scheduled release.
For more information, see the documentation.
-Peter
[1]: The current professional and production plans, and not legacy plans from before August 2019.
