Engine Yard, a provider of Ruby on Rails automation and management technologies, on July 21 announced the availability of its Engine Yard Cloud services platform and the general availability of Flex, a cloud services plan for production-level Ruby on Rails applications. According to the company:
“Engine Yard Cloud is a platform for web teams and developers that provides easy-to-use, automated Rails application deployment and management on cloud infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services. … Engine Yard Cloud provides application-aware auto-scaling, auto-healing and monitoring and a highly optimized, pre-integrated Rails managed run-time. Engine Yard Cloud is also backed by the company’s optional 24×7 Premium Support from Engine Yard.”Given the growing popularity of Rails and the number of developers struggling with infrastructure clouds, the absence of a deployment and management platform for Rails applications was a big gap in the market,” said Tom Mornini, CTO of Engine Yard. “With Engine Yard Cloud, we have closed that gap and are allowing developers and businesses to confidently tap into the power of the cloud with our team of experts at their back.”“
William Fellows, an analyst with The 451 Group, said: “Fast development frameworks like Rails combined with agile development methods have made it easier for developers to build applications, but then what? Deployment and maintenance-not to mention scalability, uptime and performance-require a level of tooling and expertise that most developers don’t have or don’t have the time to build. There are a variety of cloud management solutions on the market, but none fully address the specific needs of application developers. Engine Yard closes this chasm and is a major asset to cloud-based businesses building applications with Rails.”
According to the company’s news release:
“With its Flex plan, Engine Yard Cloud now serves customers running production applications that want to leverage the on-demand flexibility of a cloud but also need application-level scaling, reliability and support. Applications can scale on demand as their needs change to react to user growth and traffic spikes in real time. And with developer features like automated deployment from source check-ins, handling rapid application changes driven by agile development is a breeze. Engine Yard Cloud also ensures greater application reliability with built-in redundancy and failover.Pricing for the Flex plan starts at $349 per month. Pricing for Engine Yard Premium Support starts at $475 per month. Engine Yard Cloud is currently available running on the Amazon EC2 infrastructure cloud and enters general availability this quarter [in August]. For more information on Flex and a description of the full feature set or to get started with Engine Yard Cloud, please visit http://www.engineyard.com/cloud-services.“
