We've been busy at browserless, incorporating feedback and concerns from our ~1,500 users. One of the things we've heard often is that our Worker settings is confusing, and today we rectify that by removing a slew of unnecessary information, and adding three simple buttons:
Force Restart
A simple one: this simply just forces your workers to restart in cases of emergency. Not something that generally happens often, but it's a nice thing to have when you need it. While there is downtime with any restart, for browserless it's only a few seconds before everything is back up and running.
Relaunch
A relaunch starts up a new Worker, provisions it, and then routes traffic to the new one. The old Worker does remain online to finish up whatever work was happening, so it's a rather graceful operation. The only caveat here is that your worker will get a new IP address, which means any filtering or firewalls you might have setup will need to be updated.
What's more is that your API token won't change, meaning you never have to update your code or application when your worker is relaunched.
Settings
We've also overhauled how settings work, and added some extra features as well, including the ability to default into "stealth" mode for puppeteer and our APIs. You can also override the global session timer, the specific version of Chrome, and adjust things like pre-booting (experimental). Making changes here does require your worker to restart, which only takes a few seconds.
New Post-Paid Plans
Alongside our monthly-based and pre-paid usage-based plans, we're excited to announce that we're allowing more onto our post-paid usage-based plans. With post-paid, you never have to worry about "topping-off" your account for more time, and simply pay for what you've used every month. Our account page shows your accumulated charges front-and-center so you know where you stand:
If you're interested in doing post-paid usage-based, please contact us to get started.
Coming soon
We're just getting started! 2021 will have a huge amount of new features. Why we can't talk in detail about everything, here's sneak peak on what we're up to:
- A proxy plan that's built into our service. No need for a 3rd-party provider.
- New "hybrid" hosted plan that's both Dedicated and usage-based. Anytime your workers are under load we'll automatically forward traffic to the usage-based cluster.
- Better self-hosted, zero-downtime configuration changes. Change workers settings and more without having to restart.
- Raising our usage-based concurrency limit past 1,000 concurrent calls.
Don't see what you want? Let us know and we'll work on it!