Engine Yard – The Upcoming Cloud Platform

Engine Yard is one of the leading development and deployment platform for the cloud. With a unique combination of Ruby on Rails Expertise, operations automation, open source community involvement, and world class service. Engine Yard empowers businesses to build and run cloud based applications easily and cost effectively.

More than 2,200 customers, from explosive growth Web start ups to Fortune 500 enterprises, trust Engine Yard for fast deployment, rapid scaling, high performance, and 24×7 up time, allowing them to leverage Rails agility for competitive advantage. Engine Yard provides a powerful degree of control over the environment when compared to Heroku.

Engine Yard Cloud offers users the flexibility to build a platform for a wide range of applications including small scale web applications and larger scale enterprise applications. In either instance, Engine Yard Cloud offers users a reliable platform solution, elasticity and high availability clusters.

Heroku, has been ahead of Engine Yard in terms of language but are now finding out that the gap is slowly closing now, as Engine Yard announced the addition of Node.js to its collection of web application tools. The adoption of Node means that Engine Yard now shares Java, Ruby and Node.js with Heroku, and offers PHP. The flexibility that Engine Yard gives to its customers is what makes it appealing to developers and bringing Node into the fold is sure to only add to their 2,200 paying users.

What is Node.js and what issue does it solve?

Node is a server-side JavaScript interpreter that changes the notion of how a server should work. Its goal is to enable a programmer to build highly-scalable applications and write code that handles tens of thousands of simultaneous connections on one, and only one, physical machine. The main issue Node.js tries to solve is the maximum number of concurrent connections a server can handle in the entire web application architecture. Node accomplishes its goals of providing highly-scalable servers by using extremely fast JavaScript engine from Google, the V8 engine. It uses an Event-Driven design to keep code minimal and easy-to-read.

Even though it may be a bit late in the game, this move by Engine Yard prepares them to handle the tough competition they face in a crowded PaaS space that includes Heroku, Google App Engine, Cloud Bees, Cumulogic, Cloud Foundry, OpenShift, Appfog, Active State, etc. Unlike many other players in the field, Engine Yard is not spreading their wings into supporting many different languages . They are singularly focused on Ruby on Rails and PHP and want to be ‘the’ platform for applications written on this framework.