Improved hardware at Amazon

In this release we have changed the EC2 instance type used by all new Magento Excellence plans up to 3XL from the previous generation C3 type to the new generation C5 types. This change will give the Magento Excellence M 500 megabytes of extra RAM, the Excellence L 1 gigabyte of extra RAM, the Excellence XL 2 gigabytes of extra RAM and the Excellence 2XL 12 gigabytes of extra RAM and 4 additional cores.

The CPUs in the C5 type instances are faster than the CPUs in the C3 type instances so these new nodes should give your shop a nice performance boost. Currently we are making a plan to actively migrate all existing C3 nodes to this new instance type as well, but for now this change is limited to new nodes. Migrations to one of these Excellence plans will use the new node type already as well.

Other changes

  • We have automatically started blocking the MauiBot user agent on all Hypernodes to reduce the impact of bot traffic.
  • We have added various additional CPUs to our blacklist of ‘slow CPUs’ at Digital Ocean to ensure new Hypernodes can benefit optimally from the heterogeneity of hypervisors in their datacenters.
  • We have started automatically pruning the fail2ban database at night to prevent a build up of leaking disk space in the ban table in order to work around a bug in fail2ban.
  • We added a couple of EXPOSE statements to our hypernode-docker Dockerfile as suggested by Mark van der Sanden.