[New Feature] Release Tiers

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.

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As a couple sidenotes, first, we’ve been running our internal ticket tracking system on the scheduled tier for a couple weeks now, and I’m really happy with how reliable the whole process has been. It’s taken a lot of work over several months to completely re-think the idea of an application living on a single server, and it’s gratifying to see it pay off.

Second, and I’m going to be very deliberately vague here and in the rest of the thread (so don’t think you’re going to pin me down on plans or timelines!), but there’s a lot of features that are downstream of this one and some other work we’ve been doing behind the scenes. Suffice it to say, I’m really excited about what comes next for Bubble. I’ve been a Bubble employee for over two years, and I’ve never been as excited for what’s on the roadmap as I am today.

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:+1:t2::+1:t2::+1:t2:

That definitely piqued my interest! Excited to see what comes next. :raised_hands:

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This is cool. And I’m glad you’re so excited @peterj.

However, I’m a bit concerned about the limitations applied in the hobby plan. It worries me for what’s to come with other plans. Especially after seeing random posts recently about users seeing raised pricing on the paid plans. @emmanuel @josh

Yes!!! Can’t wait to see what else is in store for us Bubblers :eyes:

Honestly when I saw “Scheduled Deployments” I thought it was in the sense that we can schedule when updates go live lol, then I read it all and realized

Hey @peterj I wrote a bug report to support but it seems that if you switch to the scheduled tier the bubble editor and your site in conjunction suddenly stop working where it says, if you’re in the bubble editor, bubble.io is currently unable to handle this request HTTP Error 503 and if you load your site you get the same error where it says “site is unable to handle this request”. Probably popping up for others as well.

Thanks for that report! Our team is working on getting this resolved, and we will update you all here as soon as possible.

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Great update :raised_hands: Thanks @peterj and the Bubble team!

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This is awesome! Now, can we have the feature for us to push our updates out at a scheduled time? That would be even better. Pair up my end-user updates to be made at the same time as the bubble updates.

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Yesss!!! @afterthoughtsystem agreeeddd!! Please!!

Been talking about it here: Scheduling Deployment Updates?

It’s one of the top ideas on the Ideaboard

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Great work and much needed on the stability side of things. Look forward to those future releases being rolled out.

@jonathan.timianko I believe @jess is handling this, but I’ve made a change to our load balancer that should resolve your issues. Sorry for any inconvenience; I really should learn not to tempt the fates by patting myself on the back too early :sweat_smile:

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Hey @peterj no worries! Yes I spoke with @jess and all’s well now, have a great weekend!

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So great. Thank you @Bubble !!

I can feel your excitement in this paragraph. It makes me excited too :slight_smile:

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What a considerate change! Thank you! I’ll be switching over just as soon as I’m confident it’s solid.

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great (much-needed) update. We’re switched over to scheduled now - thank you!

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Hi, does this include Legacy Team plans?

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+1 to this

Edit:
Also, this is also fantastic news and is, IMHO, the most important feature upgrade to the platform since I began using it in 2018. This really signals to me that the bubble platform is maturing. This seems like technological accomplishment to allow scheduled updates for all these apps that are running in the ‘shared’ environment. Bravo.