Phacility Updates

We made some updates to Phacility (our Phabricator hosting service). These don't directly impact Phabricator, but I'll discuss them briefly.

Instance allocation now automatically chooses the shard with the most capacity instead instead of always choosing the most recent shard, and we have a new shard capacity console for monitoring utilization.

When we first launched we only had one shard and had a murkier picture of how capacity would be limited and what those limits would be, but have grown enough now that manual management of shard capacity was no longer working well in all cases. We also have a clearer picture of what capacity limits we face.

Test instances now last for 7 days, up from 2 days. Better capacity management gives us a greater ability to float test instances.

Instance creation is now explicitly modal, and prompts you to choose between a test instance and a standard instance. We saw some confusion from users about how to launch test instances, and hope this will reduce that.

Instances previously generated an invoice after the first billing period, with instructions to disable the instance in the first 30 days if you elected not to continue service. This was the easiest approach to implement technically, but a few users found it completely bewildering.

Now, instances are strictly free for the first 30 days or your first billing period, whichever is longer. At the end of your first billing period, you'll receive an email telling you to expect an invoice after your second billing period and giving you instructions on how to disable your instance if you don't want to continue service.

The instance creation UI should be more clear about this now, as well, and we've emphasized and reiterated that you can just disable instances and disregard invoices at any time and for any reason.

Upcoming

Work on ApplicationEditor (T9132) continues, but made little progress this week. This remains my focus for next week.

Nuance (T8783) and updates to Projects (T9378) and Phriction (T9379) are still the plans for the remainder of the year, but some of that is almost certainly going to slip.