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July 21, 2023

Projects

Shawn Moore
We’re thrilled to share that projects are now generally available. Projects make it easier for you and your team to collaborate on apps. Organize all of the services associated with an app in a project and further group services by environment — staging, production, etc. — to make building with your team easier and more streamlined. Render began with a simple question — how do we make it easier for developers to run code in the cloud? Every day, developers toil with overly complicated cloud configurations that are hard to maintain. As developers, you know you have less time to think about what you’re building if you also need to handle the intimidating complexity of public cloud offerings. Teams are increasingly aware of the cost of managing infrastructure and are choosing Render instead. While it was easy to set up an app with one or two services, like a database and a server, teams shared that they needed help managing apps on Render with many services. Our overview page featured a long list of services associated with a team or account. We didn’t have a way for teams to express how their services were related or organize them by environment. Today, Render is announcing our first launch to improve the development team experience — projects. Projects have two essential functions. First, developers can now group services related to an app together. Say you’ve built an app for recruiting on Render. You can now organize your servers, Redis job queue, database, cron jobs, and other services you’ve configured to support your app together in a project.
Render Dashboard's homepage, now organized into projects
Render Dashboard's homepage, now organized into projects
 Second, projects help developers organize their services into environments. As teams grow on Render, we see them start to create development and staging deployments. Previously, naming was the only way to distinguish between a development or staging service. Developers appended “-staging” or “-stg” to the end of a service’s name. Now, projects have a built-in affordance to group services by environment, making it easier for teams to ensure that they deploy to the right services when testing changes.
Project overview page, including its Production and Staging environments
Project overview page, including its Production and Staging environments
 Projects represent a paradigm shift in how apps are developed, tested, and deployed on Render. Allowing developers to group services unlocks new possibilities for how teams build their apps throughout the development lifecycle. We will continue to release new capabilities for projects over the next year, and we can’t wait to share what we have in store. Projects are now available for all developers on the Team plan or higher. We’re building Render so that teams like yours can collaborate better, so reach out to let us know how we can improve projects.