Engine Yard, a platform-as-a-service (PAAS)
provider for Ruby on Rails, has introduced Engine Yard xCloud, an expansion of
the company's platform for deploying and managing Ruby applications in the
cloud.
Just a week before the RailsConf
annual confab for Ruby on Rails developers in Baltimore June 7-10, Engine Yard
announced that both of its PAAS products,
xCloud and AppCloud, run on the company's optimized Rails "stack" and
take advantage of similar features for managing and deploying applications.
However, xCloud utilizes a more extensible infrastructure as a service (IAAS)
to better meet the demands of Ruby applications that require customizable
hardware or service-level agreements (SLAs), or need to meet security and
compliance standards such as PCI or SAS70.
The introduction of xCloud builds upon the successful Engine Yard AppCloud
product that uses IAAS capacity from Amazon Web Services. However, xCloud uses
IAAS capacity from Terremark's Enterprise Cloud product to provide customers
with high-performance SAN storage,
guaranteed resources, custom hardware support and a variety of compliance
guarantees, the company said.
"We created xCloud in response to growing demand from customers who
want to run Ruby on Rails applications in the cloud, but require strict
regulatory compliance and low-latency, high-throughput disk I/O for superior
database performance," said Tom Mornini, Engine Yard CTO
and co-founder, in a statement. "xCloud levels the playing field in those
dimensions against competing platforms such as Force.com and Microsoft Azure,
both of which use proprietary languages. Our products are 100 percent open
source and deliver all of the benefits of a PAAS
with zero fear of vendor lock-in."
Indeed, Engine Yard officials said xCloud delivers a no lock-in solution
that improves application performance and accelerates development. Because the
Engine Yard stack is highly customized and fully managed, customers realize
performance improvements as high as 30 percent "out of the box,"
Mornini said. Engine Yard AppCloud and xCloud products also eliminate the
overhead of managing complex middleware, saving valuable development cycles so
teams can get products to market faster, he said.
"We're very excited by the strategic direction of Engine Yard. Their
focus on providing a broad range of deployment options, from xCloud running on
Terremark infrastructure to AppCloud running on Amazon infrastructure, gives us
the flexibility we need as we scale our 24/7 global business," said Peter
Styles, CEO of RedBubble, in a statement.
"We chose Engine Yard because they offer a world-class Rails application
cloud with a brain trust of Rails experts that we can tap into whenever we need
it. Deploying on Engine Yard has freed our engineers to focus on development
and has provided an enormous productivity boost with significant savings in
engineering resources."
"It's great that Engine Yard is offering the ability to connect to
multiple infrastructures because it helps us to meet the varying requirements
for our clients' applications running in the cloud," said Alon Salant,
principal and founder of Carbon Five, a software development firm and Engine
Yard partner. "Engine Yard Platform-as-a-Service has proven to be a fantastic
turnkey solution for Carbon Five and our clients. Projects start with instant
setup of development and staging environments, release with customized and
robust configurations, and grow with scalable infrastructure and operational
support to deliver high-performance, revenue-generating applications."
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