There are many ways to add search functionality to a Rails application. While many Rails developers choose to use the native search functionality built into popular databases like MySQL and Postgres, others need more flexible or feature rich search functionality. ElasticSearch is probably the most well known option available but it has its own issues. Firstly, it is a resource hungry beast. To run ElasticSearch properly in production, you need a few beefy servers.

Announcing support for Ubuntu 20.04 on all Cloud 66 products (including registered servers). From this point onward, brand new applications will have Ubuntu 20.04 installed. We will continue to install Ubuntu 18.04 when scaling up servers in an existing application. Don't forget, you can control your target Ubuntu version through your manifest! It has been a while in the building and testing (and dependency pruning), but we are now very pleased to make it public.

Today we are releasing a completely new product: Cloud 66 Prepress. Prepress is a DevOps product for pre-rendered web applications - particularly those built around Jamstack architecture. We announced Cloud 66 for Rails in 2013. Our Rails product helps developers deploy Rails applications to any cloud with a Heroku-like experience. Today, tens of thousands of developers worldwide use our products to deploy their applications to any cloud.

Welcome to the Cloud 66 Changelog. These are the changes that have gone out this month.

Service Accounts are "headless" Cloud 66 accounts - they are like team members that cannot log into the UI. They allow you to set up automation tasks or notifications that are not bound to a real person's account.

Today we are rolling out a major new feature for all our Rails applications: support for Blue / Green deployments and Canary Releases. This is the most significant feature we've released since Rolling and Parallel Deployment Strategies were released last year, and we're very excited to help our customers deploy their applications more confidently.

Hot on the trail of our Rollout Strategies release, we are very excited to release another major feature for our Rails users: Preview Deployments Many of us use Continuous Integration (CI) to automatically test our code with every git commit. Preview Deployments adds support for Continuous Deployments (CD) to all Rails applications deployed with Cloud 66.