Altis v25 has landed, and it brings brand new capabilities to give you control over your Altis Cloud experience. With v25, we’re launching new tools to help you understand and manage your traffic.
Alongside these powerful new tools, we’ve continued refining your experience, with improvements to deploy reliability and iterations on local tooling – along with full support for PHP 8.4.
Ship your access logs to your own S3 bucket
All aboard! Altis now offers log shipping, providing customers with an easy way to connect their CDN HTTP access logs to external services.
No matter whether you’re integrating with external tools or simply keeping a backup, log shipping makes it easy to get a copy of your access logs. Log shipping integrates directly with an S3 bucket of your choice, sending standard (W3C) access logs on a regular basis.
Log Shipping is a paid add-on for your existing subscription. Ask your account manager for more details.
Easier updates to IP block and allow lists
With Altis, every customer gets their own segregated infrastructure, including our powerful firewall. We’ve long allowed customers to tweak their firewall for their needs, with the top requests being to either block bad IPs or bypass the rate limit for external services.
Launching as part of v25, you can now directly manage allow and block lists for your firewall, right in the Altis Dashboard. Provide individual IP addresses or specify a whole CIDR range, and add, update, or remove them whenever you want.
Blocked IP addresses are blocked directly at the firewall level, protecting your site and ensuring they don’t count towards your billable traffic.
Any IPs you allow to bypass our rate limits still apply security checks, ensuring your environment remains fully protected – plus, with our Advanced Security add-on, you’ll still be protected against zero-days.
Self-managed IP lists are available now for all customers, at no extra cost.
Block unwanted traffic with Advanced Traffic Management
Traffic across the internet is growing fast, and not all of it is friendly. We’ve heard from customers that they’re seeing more bots, more scrapers, and more low quality traffic than ever. That noise can inflate costs, slow down performance, and skew analytics.
With Altis v25, we’re launching Advanced Traffic Management, a powerful new add-on which provides new ways to take control of your traffic.
Like everyone on the web, we’ve seen the rise of AI-driven traffic, both for training and for driving responses from agents. As users of AI tools, there’s a huge amount of value in being able to get accurate responses when asking questions, but this massive increase in traffic is not always a plus.
Our customers fall into two broad categories: those who drive revenue directly from traffic on their site (such as through advertisements), and those who just want to get their message out (such as marketing sites). For the former, AI traffic directly hurts their bottom line by reducing their traffic; while for the latter, AI traffic can be beneficial!
As a platform, we have to design our standard firewall (WAF) rules in a way that minimizes costs to customers without removing legitimate traffic. Our rules include protection against a wide range of illegitimate traffic, including known bad bots and attack vectors. Increasingly however, bad actors are masquerading their traffic as regular users to attempt to evade controls. These techniques can be difficult and expensive to detect – plus, for some customers, this traffic is still valuable!
With Advanced Traffic Management, we unlock a wide array of new tools to help combat bad actors, combined with an approach tailored to each customer’s needs. This includes using techniques such as fingerprinting, heuristic detection, and machine learning algorithms to monitor and combat this traffic.
Deciding what to do once you’ve found the traffic is the next step. Our initial release includes the ability to trigger CAPTCHAs and complex challenges, minimizing the potential for false positives, while blocking illegitimate traffic.
This is just the start of our work – we’re also working towards additional options for handling this traffic, including integration with monetization platforms, enabling publishers to turn a cost center into a new revenue stream.
Advanced Traffic Management is a paid add-on for your existing Altis subscription. Pricing depends on your traffic – with a free trial available to check the expected impact ahead of time. Ask your account manager for more details.
Future ready with PHP 8.4
For teams who are ready to upgrade to the next version of PHP, we’ve got you – PHP 8.4 is now available!
Altis v25 includes PHP 8.4 support in Local Server, ready for you to develop with. You’ll also now see PHP 8.4 as an option in the Altis Dashboard.
Note that while PHP 8.4 is available, you should be aware of potential limitations with it. WordPress 6.8 (bundled in Altis v25) indicates PHP 8.4 is still in beta status due to low usage (only about 4% of sites), and you may experience compatibility issues with third-party plugins and themes in the ecosystem. Make sure you test extensively before deploying!
We’ve removed support for the v8js extension with PHP 8.4, and it’s now considered deprecated in earlier versions. Usage of this extension was low, as block development has changed substantially. For customers who want to use JavaScript for server applications, we recommend shifting to our Node.js support.
Our default PHP version for new projects is now also PHP 8.3 – the newest major version fully supported by WordPress.
Continuous refinement of everything you love
This release includes a broad set of library updates, module improvements, and bug fixes. These updates are part of our ongoing investment in performance, stability, and long term reliability.
This includes improvements to make our blue-green deployments more reliable, eliminating edge cases related to high-frequency Cavalcade (wp-cron) tasks. This removes the potential of a race condition during deployment, triggered during high-activity publishing periods.
Local Server gets a clean upgrade too. We have updated core tooling and third party dependencies to keep your local environment fast, modern, and closely aligned with production. Fewer hiccups and more consistency means more productive developers.
Get started
Altis v25 is another step forward in our mission to empower teams with a secure, scalable, and flexible platform that grows with their needs. Whether you’re diving deep on your traffic data, taking control of your traffic, or just keeping up to date with the latest PHP versions, this release gives you more confidence and more capability across every layer of your stack.
Ready to go? Take a look at the Altis v25 Upgrade Guide to get started. If Advanced Traffic Management or log shipping is on your radar, your account manager can walk you through configuration and rollout.