May 2020 Summaries

Vercel is a cloud platform that combines the strengths of static websites and serverless functions to enable instant deployment and automated scaling of Jamstack applications with simplicity and transparency, leveraging familiar Git workflows. It's used in conjunction with Gatsby.js, a popular free and open-source framework based on React, for building fast and search engine-friendly websites. The platform integrates with GitHub, allowing developers to set up E2E testing and monitoring using Checkly, which automates the deployment process and provides real-time feedback on application performance. With Vercel and Checkly, developers can streamline their workflows, free up time for development, and focus on building high-quality applications.

We experienced a 5-hour outage between 15:44 PM UTC and 20:38 PM UTC due to a bug in our release and deployment software, which affected browser check results but not API checks. A recent change aimed to prevent accidental "canary flags" from being deployed without proper testing, but another code change was overlooked. The issue occurred when the deployment pipeline was updated without the necessary accompanying code change, triggering an anomaly that wasn't caught by our existing monitoring and alerting setup. We were alerted to the problem by a customer ticket on Intercom and resolved the issue with a hotfix deployed within 45 minutes. To prevent similar issues in the future, we've added more checks to the deployment process, implemented specific CloudWatch alarms for anomaly detection, and decided not to deploy after lunch hours for at least the foreseeable future.

We've released several new features and fixes over the last month, including improved Handlebars support with additional helpers for creating checks and alerts. We also added random number and UUID generators to simplify data generation, making it easier to create webhooks that can translate between Checkly terms and third-party tools. Furthermore, we introduced a Groups API, allowing users to create, update, and delete check groups via the public API, which enables bulk creation of checks with shared settings. These updates enhance the overall functionality and usability of the platform.