May 2018 Summaries

Netlify is allowing users to configure reCAPTCHA 2 validations in their forms, giving them full control over the security of their project. This can be done by setting the site key and secret in build environment variables, with Netlify using these values to secure form submissions. Users can find more details on how to implement this update in the docs.

The update displays deploy status information in the favicon on browser tabs, with a yellow dot for building and a white check or red dot with line through for success or failure respectively. The design of the favicons aimed to balance color and shape considerations while ensuring accessibility for users with vision impairments. Various iterations were explored before settling on shapes that provide clear visual distinction between states.

Netlify's platform team has successfully migrated their origin services between cloud providers, Google Cloud (GCP), AWS, and Rackspace, without any service interruptions. This multi-cloud migration was planned and tested to ensure minimal latency and uptime. The team used a tool called "cloud bench" to check the performance of uploads to different cloud storages, and implemented automatic fallbacks for data replication between providers. They also built a Go service that could inspect an existing blob, figure out where it needed to push it to, actually push it, and record its progress. The system is now flexible enough to handle recovering quickly, with traffic redirected internally by updating service configurations. The team tested the full migration, sending a small trickle of production traffic to verify that nothing was being dropped or stalled. They successfully completed the cutover on a Sunday night when Netlify sees its lowest traffic levels, and are now able to swap between cloud providers without any user impact.