August 19th 2011 By Monty Mitra

Stack Management and GitHub Account Linking

__UPDATE: __Stack Change Management is now live!

The team here is continuing to crank out new features that we think will benefit all of you and we wanted to announce two of those today!

Stack Change Management

Many of you have asked if we could add some additional information when we release updates to your environment that require you to click the 'Update' button. A few months ago, we began [posting release notes to our Documentation page](http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2011/appcloud-update-notifications/) but we wanted to take this a step further - Stack Change Management.

Essentially, we are splitting the current ‘Update' button into an ‘Apply' button and an ‘Upgrade' button. You will now be able to clearly distinguish between changes that you have made (updating your SSL certificates, for example) and the updates that Engine Yard has released. All of these changes will be made completely visible and you will have complete control over when to apply either of these sets of changes. In order to apply only your changes to the environment without upgrading to the latest Engine Yard updates, click ‘Apply.' When you are ready to upgrade to the latest Engine Yard updates, then click ‘Upgrade.' Before committing any of these changes, you will be able to view an itemized list of everything about to be applied to your environment. As always, we suggest that you test the upgrades in a cloned environment before upgrading in a production environment. We think Stack Change Management will greatly benefit everyone by adding this additional level of transparency. This feature will not otherwise affect your environment and you do not need to take any prior action. When it goes live, head over to our [Documentation](http://docs.engineyard.com/) page for more information. #### GitHub Account Linking

Additionally, we are also pleased to announce that you can now link your AppCloud account to your GitHub account. Once linked, it's no longer necessary to copy-and-paste deployment keys from one service to the other. This feature is currently in public Beta for everyone to use and we expect to have it in GA in a couple of weeks. For more documentation, please [go here](http://docs.engineyard.com/linking-github-to-appcloud.html).
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