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Engine Yard, provider of a multi-language platform as a service (PaaS) offering, has announced the general availability of Node.js on Engine Yard Cloud.
Node.js is a popular JavaScript-based framework for building highly scalable, real-time Web applications. It uses JavaScript-the language of the browser-to unify development of front-end and server-side architectures. Engine Yard Cloud is a commercial grade, highly configurable PaaS for Ruby on Rails, PHP and now Node.js, and is optimized for building applications that scale to meet the requirements of startups to large enterprises.
With the addition of Node.js to the Engine Yard Cloud supported frameworks, developers can deploy highly scalable and concurrent systems, which will expand their ability to build modern innovative applications in the cloud.
“As the leading PaaS provider, Engine Yard is proud to demonstrate its ongoing commitment to the developer community by supporting the latest technologies and offering a choice of frameworks and infrastructure as a service options,” Bill Platt, vice president of operations at Engine Yard, said in a statement. “We continue to provide our customers with a superior platform, so they can build high-performing Web applications that engage customers more effectively. Our platform provides the reliability, flexibility and deep expertise across Ruby on Rails, PHP and Node.js, empowering enterprises and developers to focus on innovation that drives business growth.”
“Node.js is a popular programming framework that is increasingly used by developers to create cloud-native applications,” Yefim Natis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. “Using platform as a service, development teams can focus on building high-performance mobile and Web business apps, instead of managing the underlying cloud infrastructure. As more companies seek to run applications in the cloud, PaaS is the preferred choice for enterprises and startups that want to achieve both cloud productivity and cloud scale.”
Node.js is an open-source, event-driven application development framework built with a single unifying concurrency model that simplifies the development of distributed real-time applications, Engine Yard said. It has a growing, active and passionate community that boasts the second most watched repository on GitHub, and Node.js is used by developers in startups, enterprises, development shops and digital agencies. The typical use cases for Node.js include real-time applications that require constant feedback and input, and Web applications that are concurrent and have long-running requests or responses, such as networked multiplayer games, interactive tools, and Websites and Web analytics.
The Engine Yard PaaS solution has to compete in the PaaS space with the likes of Red Hat’s OpenShift, Salesforce.com’s Force.com and Heroku, VMware’s Cloud Foundry, Microsoft Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Beanstalk, Google App Engine, ActiveState Stackato, CloudBees and Jelastic, among others.
“We depend on Engine Yard Cloud to run our clients’ apps because we get the scalability and reliability we need,” said Patrick Ezell, principal of COPIOUS, a Portland, Ore.-based digital agency, in a statement. “With support for additional frameworks like Node.js, our engineering team has increased flexibility and choice when building and deploying Web and mobile apps. We’ve been using Node.js on Engine Yard Cloud to develop a production app for NW Natural, the largest independent natural gas utility in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. The combination of Node.js and the Engine Yard PaaS enables us to deliver an innovative high-performance app that scales seamlessly across desktop, laptop, tablets and mobile.”
Support for Node.js on Engine Yard Cloud will be available to customers within the next 30 days.