Pantheon release notes

Beginning on May 20th, Pantheon will start enhancing our platform's scalability with an update to our traffic delivery and load balancing systems. These improvements, rolling out over the next few weeks, require no action from you.

Our new solution, built on AlloyDB, will make Pantheon more resilient to traffic spikes, including potential DDoS attacks. We’re introducing this change gradually, starting with a small percentage of traffic (less than 0.1%), to ensure maximum safety. Our engineering team will closely monitor the process and can quickly revert to the previous system if needed.

We expect that you will not notice any changes during this update, but it will result in increased reliability for your site. Once the rollout is complete and we’ve gathered data, we’ll share a detailed analysis of the benefits this upgrade brings to our platform.

PHP 8.2.19, and 8.3.7 were released on the platform. They contain the latest bug fixes for PHP.

As a reminder, PHP 8.0 reached End-of-Life on 26 November 2023. For the best performance and security, Pantheon recommends running PHP 8.2 and above.

Beginning this week, Pantheon will start transitioning individual WordPress and Drupal sites to use Sendgrid's API for the delivery of outgoing email initiated by these CMSes. We expect all sites to be fully transitioned by May 31, 2024. This change is happening at the platform level, not within the CMS code or configuration, and therefore requires no action by customers.

Reason for transition

The transition aims to enhance the reliability and deliverability of transactional emails. Historically, Pantheon has relied on a local MTA (postfix) to send these messages, which has led to common issues such as emails being categorized as spam or failing to deliver. By switching to SendGrid's API, we aim to reduce these issues and enhance the overall email delivery experience for our customers.

WordPress and Drupal core can trigger transactional emails for actions such as "Forgot Password", which allows users to reset their password after receiving an email.

For teams for whom the delivery of such transactional emails is critical to operation, we have recommended using third-party services and continue to do so even as we enhance the reliability of our platform-level emails with this switch to SendGrid.

This change should not be noticeable by most customers aside from the increased reliability of emails initiated by WordPress and Drupal.

WordPress 6.5.3 is now available on the platform.

Highlights

• 12 bug fixes in Core
• 9 bug fixes for the block editor

You can review a summary of all the updates in the 6.5.3 release candidate announcement.

The New Relic PHP agent has been updated to the latest version (v10.19.0.9). Compared with the previously available version on the platform (v10.10.0.1), some of the changes and fixes include:

• Drupal 9.4+ now reports hooks and modules (see below for more details)
• Resolved erroneous deprecation warnings for PHP 8.1+
• Support for PHP 8.3

See the complete New Relic PHP agent changelog for more details.

Learn More about New Relic, real-time performance monitoring for your Pantheon web applications.

Action Required: Default behavior of New Relic Drupal metrics has changed

Pantheon no longer supports Drupal-specific metrics in New Relic by default. However, the functionality is still available. If this is crucial for troubleshooting your sites, please add these lines to your site’s pantheon.yml file to enable this reporting:

Our support team is happy to help if you have any questions or need assistance.

Effective May 1, 2024, Pantheon began to enforce a monthly limit of synthetics checks for each Pantheon account (excluding ping checks).

• Each Pantheon account can run up to 10,000 New Relic synthetic checks per month (unlimited number of ping checks).
• Pantheon provides a monthly shared number of synthetic checks for all Pantheon customers.
• To ensure that all Pantheon users can use Synthetics, we ask customers to reduce their checks to <10,000 per month per Pantheon account.
• After May 1, 2024, Pantheon will take action by reducing the number of synthetic checks in Pantheon accounts exceeding 10,000 checks per month.
• Pantheon will not delete synthetic monitors or historical data but will reduce the frequency and the number of locations where a synthetics monitor orginates from.

We have updated the WordPress core upstreams (WordPress and WordPress (Composer Managed)) to provide a new PANTHEON_HOSTNAME constant. This value can be helpful when defining DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE on WordPress multisite installations. By default, the PANTHEON_HOSTNAME constant is set to the value of the HTTP_HOST server variable, which is the hostname of the request. However, when this value is unavailable, the PANTHEON_HOSTNAME provides fallback values, thereby avoiding "Undefined index: HTTP_HOST" warnings. For more information, refer to our WordPress Multisite configuration guide.

The latest 1.4.1 release of the Pantheon MU Plugin updates the recommended configuration for WordPress multisite to use the new PANTHEON_HOSTNAME constant when defining DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE rather than the previous recommendation -- either $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] or a complicated PHP switch.

We're announcing Workflow Logs, a powerful new feature for enhanced visibility and troubleshooting operations on the Pantheon platform. The feature can be accessed directly from your site dashboard, adjacent to the Support tab.

Key features

• Status overview: View key information on the status of workflows, including progress statuses, along with additional details such as start time, end time, initiating team member, and environment.
• In-depth details: Access code sync, error details, build logs, and Quicksilver posted messages from the expandable sections.
• Filtering: The workflows displayed comprise a curated list of user-relevant workflows. Further narrow your focus by utilizing filters to quickly find specific workflows by environment or completion status.
• Archiving: Export all visible workflows to a CSV file for archival purposes with the 'Download to CSV' button.

View all features

Request early access

If you're interested in getting early access to Workflow Logs, we invite you to join our early access program. Simply fill out the request form to apply. This will allow you to start using the feature and provide us with valuable feedback to help improve it further.

Our team will continuously enhance Workflow Logs through a planned list of improvements as well as collected feedback throughout the early access program.