This is one of the most exciting newsletters we’ve sent in a while. We’ve deployed really awesome changes we want to share with you, some that have been highly requested for a long time. I’m sure you’re going to love it.

— Chris Nagele and the Wildbit Team

Deployments to Your Amazon S3 Account

A few weeks ago we released the ability to deploy from Beanstalk to your own Amazon S3 account. Amazon’s S3 servers are a great place to store assets or a static website. This new integration comes complete with CloudFront support, which allows you to globally distribute your files or assets across a CDN (content delivery network). Beanstalk will automatically invalidate CloudFront cache to ensure the files are always up to date. If you use S3, or are interested in a different way to store assets or static sites, read more details about our S3 deployments and the CloudFront support.

Deployments Transfer Log

We’re happy to announce a highly anticipated addition to our Deployments tools: a real-time transfer log. Now, as you deploy your files with Beanstalk, we’ll show you exactly what Beanstalk is doing, in real time. You’ll see the entire transaction live, whether it’s files being transferred through FTP or commands being executed via SSH.

You can now:

• See exactly what commands are being run in your SSH deployments, like watching the output from a Capistrano deployment, live.
• Know exactly what was transferred to your server, seeing any delays along the way.
• Share the result of any deployment with your team, seeing exactly what files were added, removed and modified.

Enhanced Security

It’s obvious security is critical to an application like Beanstalk, and we do a lot to protect you on our side. We’ve been working to encourage better security from the human side, like weak passwords or logging in from a public computer. In the last month we’ve launched the following security updates that will help deter the chances of many preventable mistakes from happening.

A Better Strong Password Algorithm

We’ve rebuilt the way in which Beanstalk measures your password strength using some public algorithms. We’ll now measure password strength by checking the time it would take for someone to crack your password. This isn’t your typical requirement of one capital letter and one number. We are checking for the possibility of brute force attacks, dictionary attacks, etc. When you go to edit your password, or invite a new user to your account, we’ll be very blunt on how strong the password is. We really hope you’ll be encouraged to create a strong password if yours can be cracked easily.

Our suggestion is to use a haystack-type password. This is typically several (at least 4) real words, separated by spaces or periods, that mean complete nonsense. Something like: deer carries invisible purple. The goal is to make a long password (harder to crack) but one that is actually memorable. We encourage everyone to login and change their password (top right, Profile and Settings) to start fresh with a really strong one. Learn more about creating a strong password.

Enforcing Strong Passwords and Disabling Remember Me Function

All of our Business account owners can now require their users to have strong passwords. If you choose to enable this new feature, Beanstalk will make every user with a weak password change it when they try to login next time (they can skip it twice in case they need to login quickly). We’ll also require any new user on the account to create a strong password. This gives you the peace of mind knowing that your source code isn’t protected with admin / admin as its’ credentials.

You can also prevent any illegitimate access to your code because someone forgot to uncheck Remember Me at their coffee-shop’s public computer. Owners of Business accounts can ask Beanstalk to require a user to enter their username and password every time they need to login to the web interface. This will disable Remember Me, as well as browser auto-complete for your entire account. This may be annoying to some, but it’s added security for managing a team of people.

Enabling both new features can be done by all owners of Gold and above plans under the Account section, in the Security tab.

Fresh From the Beanstalk blog:

• Check out photos and plans from our recent company retreat in Mallorca
• Require SVN commit messages for your team
• Learn how we improved Beanstalk performance by 20 times