Support a graceful shutdown for a web service with an attached disk
T
Tanin Na Nakorn
Today if a web service is attached with a disk, Render doesn't support a graceful shutdown. If I understand correctly, this is because Render wants to prevent 2 services writing to the same disk.
However, for my case, I just need a graceful shutdown. I don't need the zero downtime deployment and don't need a new instance to start before the previous instance completely shutdowns.
I need a graceful shutdown in order to ensure the data isn't corrupted. Killing the service in a sudden manner increases the risk of corrupted data.
Thank you.
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g
gtom198245
Problem:
We run a production web service (
faith-hub-web
on a 2c-4g Pro plan) with an 8 GB persistent disk mounted at /data/faith-media
for production media storage. Because services with persistent disks are currently restricted to a single instance (1/1), every routine deployment causes a 2–5 minute window of 502 Bad Gateway errors while the single instance rotates out. Our external uptime monitor (Pingdom) flagged four separate downtime windows in a single day (Oct 16, 2026) during a normal deployment cadence.
Root Cause:
Attempting to scale the service returns: "Scalable disk-backed services early access feature must be enabled to scale a service with a disk," but support confirmed the early access program is not currently accepting new services.
Requested Solution:
Graduate the "Scalable disk-backed services" feature to general availability, or provide shared/read-write storage semantics (or zero-downtime rolling deploys) that allow multiple instances of a disk-backed service to run concurrently.
Business Impact:
This affects any production service that stores user uploads on a persistent volume and deploys frequently. We are ready to pay the standard per-instance rate for additional instances today; the only blocker is the platform constraint.
Submitted by: Jeremy Mills