Our roadmap

Exclusive insights into your shop performance

In close collaboration with Tideways, we integrate Application Performance Monitoring (APM) directly into the Managed Center to provide you with in-depth analysis of your performance data. With this first milestone of our year-long performance project, you can effortlessly identify bottlenecks, track key trends, and specifically optimize your customers’ user experience. Since the data is securely stored directly at maxcluster, you benefit from full control and maximum transparency while complying with the highest data protection standards. Experience modern performance monitoring based on real data – this feature is available to you free of charge for all throughout this year.

With this new feature, backups will be stored in a geo-redundant manner in the future. This allows us to offer our customers maximum data security through unalterable backups at a separate location. In addition, geographical separation combined with immutable backup snapshots significantly increases protection against ransomware: even in the event of a successful attack, the backed-up data remains completely intact and can be reliably restored at any time.

Redis is now available in version 8. With this update, customers benefit from improvements in performance, stability, and security, as well as new features and optimizations of the current Redis generation. As usual, Redis can be installed directly in the Managed Center or updated to the new version.

Valkey is available as a one-to-one replacement for Redis. Following the license changes at Redis, Valkey has quickly established itself as an open-source alternative and is already recommended by Shopware and Magento. As with Redis, we apply our usual quality standards here too.

With local mc, we offer a local development environment that replicates the maxcluster production environment.

The tool is based on DDEV and makes it easier for developers to test and debug under realistic conditions.

An upgrade to MySQL 8.4 can now be carried out by our service upon request. The upgrade is available for Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 clusters and can be requested directly in the Managed Center. For newly installed clusters, MySQL 8.4 is installed by default.

MySQL 8.4 delivers significantly improved performance and enables faster queries. At the same time, it increases security through modern encryption and authentication methods. As the latest LTS version, MySQL 8.4 also ensures long-term stability and regular updates.

At the request of our Customer Advisory Board, we have significantly expanded the control options for FTP users. With new commands in the command line, our customers can now manage FTP users themselves at the server level – from status queries and password resets to creating new users and assigning permissions. This reduces administrative effort and gives them more control over their infrastructure.

We have converted our invoices to the ZUGFeRD e-invoicing format. All invoices will be sent as usual and will also be available for download in the Managed Center. This service enables us to offer greater efficiency and digital transparency.

In addition to the cluster view, a customer view is now also available in our overview in the Application Center. You can easily switch between the two views via a menu tab.

Supervisor is now also available in Cluster Control. Supervisor, supervisor programs and groups can be controlled via the commands.

PHP 8.3 is available for installation in the Managed Center and offers better performance, syntax and type safety. In addition, any available PHP versions can be installed or uninstalled under Apache and NGINX via a new option.

For VarnishSSL, it is now possible to play out assets directly instead of tunneling them via Varnish. Adjustments can be made for the selected domain via the Varnish SSL settings, thereby reducing loading times.

Solr 8.11.2 is available on all clusters with Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04. In the Managed Center, version 8.11.2 is now automatically installed when Solr version 8.11 is selected.

With our new user interface in the Application Center, we offer you a better overview and more user-friendliness. In addition to the visual redesign, you will find new features such as favourites and filter options. The speed is also significantly increased by the modern Java script framework Vue.js.

Varnish is available in version 7.3 in the Application Center for customers running Ubuntu 20.04 and newer. For more information regarding Varnish, feel free to read our blog post.

In the "package updates" view within the Managed Center, you will now find all software package updates along with their complete version information.

The latest version, 2.6, of OpenSearch is now available in the Managed Center.

For improved performance and configuration options, our Managed Center now offers enhanced features for individual OPCache configuration. These include opcache.max_accelerated_files, opcache.interned_strings_buffer, opcache.revalidate_freq, and opcache.memory_consumption. Benefit from optimized PHP script processing and increased performance.

Starting in February, you can activate PHP 8.2 in the Managed Center on all Ubuntu clusters. New features in PHP 8.2 include read-only classes, an interface for generating random numbers, three standalone types, and the linking of intersection and union types. For a detailed overview of the new features and deprecations in PHP 8.2, see the announcement on php.net and the documentation there.

Varnish is available in version 7.1 and 7.2 in the Application Center for customers running Ubuntu 18.04 and newer. For more information regarding Varnish, feel free to read our blog post.

On April 21 of this year, the latest LTS version of Ubuntu was released. We have optimized our e-commerce stack for Ubuntu 22.04 and adapted our Application Center to provide clusters with the new operating system.

All Redis 6 and 7 minor versions are supported in the Application Center.

Varnish is available in version 7.0 in the Application Center for customers running Ubuntu 18.04 and newer. For more information regarding Varnish, feel free to read our blog post.

The Managed Center, which is part of the Application Center, has been set up specifically to support our English-speaking customers. Please note that so far only the most important services we offer have been translated.

With OpenSearch 1.2, another open-source search and analysis suite will be available in our Managed Center from March 8th, 2022. This is compatible with the new Magento version 2.4.4, among others. Please see our FAQ page for more information.

On all clusters running Ubuntu 20.04, TLS 1.3 support is now available for NGINX, Apache 2, and VarnishSSL. On clusters running Ubuntu 18.04, TLS 1.3 is supported for NGINX and VarnishSSL.

For security reasons, we recommend that our customers protect their account in the Managed Center with 2-factor authentication. If this was activated, it was previously only possible to have a lost secret reset by a maxcluster employee. To make this process more convenient, we have developed alternative restore methods. You can find detailed step-by-step instructions and further information on our FAQ page.

Customers have the option of specifying alternative name servers directly when ordering the domain. Taking the domain with them also ensures that existing DNS configurations are not overwritten.

As a user of Cluster Control, in addition to the API Key, you can now also use the Personal Access Token to log in to Cluster Control.

As a user of the Managed Center, an individual return path for sendmail configurations can now be set for the VHost. This means that changes can now be made conveniently in self-service.

We have made the selection process even more convenient for customers using NGINX and running a "Symfony" application. There is now the option to simply select "Symfony" in the pull-down menu in the Managed Center in the "Application" /"NGINX" area and run it on the cluster.

On April 1, we released a major update to our cluster and customer management software "Managed Center". On our FAQ page we have summarized all relevant information about the changes.

If required, an upgrade to MySQL 8 can be performed by our service. The upgrade is possible for Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04 clusters and can be requested directly in the Managed Center. Besides the introduction of Window functions and Common Table Expressions, the JSON functions have also been enhanced in MySQL 8. Due to our best practice configuration the database instances are always performant and highly available.

Existing Elasticsearch instances can now be updated directly via the Managed Center. Here, it is also possible to switch to the next major version. In addition, the current versions are deployed much faster on Ubuntu clusters.

Daily, automatic snapshots can be configured for Elasticsearch instances. In addition, manual snapshots can be created if required. These are particularly helpful in the event of a version change, as snapshots can always be imported in the next major version of Elasticsearch. This makes the update easier and no complete re-index is necessary.

From now on, the installation of analysis, ingest and mapper plugins can be done directly in the Managed Center. The very frequently used plugins "analysis-icu" and "analysis-phonetic" are installed on all instances by default.

On April 23, the latest LTS version of Ubuntu was released. We have optimized our e-commerce stack for Ubuntu 20.04 and adapted our Managed Center so that we can now deploy clusters with the new operating system.

Customers running Ubuntu 18.04 Cluster can perform an optional update from Redis 4 to version 5 in the Managed Center.

The heap size for Elasticsearch can now be adjusted in the Managed Center. In addition, the load is displayed as a graph in the Managed Center monitoring.

The data of a Redis instance can now be emptied without detouring via the Managed Center. This function is also included in Cluster Control for integration into CI/CD processes.

The latest PHP version 7.4 can now be used on all clusters with Ubuntu 18.04 as operating system. A comprehensive overview of all relevant innovations and compatibility with existing applications is provided in our blog article PHP 7.4 - When is the update worthwhile?.

It is now possible to perform a PHP FPM reload via the Managed Center and the Cluster Control Tools. This allows changes to the PHP configuration to be applied or the opcache and symlink cache to be cleared without having to perform a hard restart. Existing connections are only terminated after a timeout of 30 seconds, so that browser requests are generally not affected.