Press

Engine Yard Introduces New Cloud Offerings

Solo and Vertebra offerings underpin Company’s strategy to enable open, secure, and manageable clouds from the ground up

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (Jan. 14, 2009) – Engine Yard today introduced its answer for the application-related problems of computing in the cloud: Engine Yard Solo and Vertebra. Together, these offerings tackle the challenges of developing, deploying, managing, and securing large-scale applications for the cloud. Solo lets customers take advantage of cloud services today, while Vertebra “future proofs” for the clouds of
tomorrow.

“The cloud is still an evolving market, with lots of promise, and the potential for proprietary lock-in,” said Tom Mornini, CTO of Engine Yard. “We believe the cloud must not balkanize and it must be accessible to everyone. Engine Yard is focused on building bridges, so that customers can take advantage of all clouds. And we give them a complete cloud application lifecycle plan to do this.”

For two years Engine Yard has specialized in Ruby and Rails application deployment by providing premium deployment services for over 400 customers on in-house hardware. Engine Yard Solo now extends this expertise to companies of all sizes by offering their services for deploying applications on the Amazon Web Services cloud.

Vertebra is the first complete, open platform for developing and managing secure cloud applications. Initially built to automate, scale, and manage customer applications running on Engine Yard’s own cloud, Vertebra has broadened into a powerful framework for building cloud-specific applications. Engine Yard has released Vertebra as open source to foster a collaborative approach to elastic application development.

“Engine Yard’s approach to the cloud fills in some critical gaps in cloud computing platforms today,” said Mike West, vice president and analyst at Saugatuck Technology. “They’re addressing issues such as lock-in, security, scalability, and overall manageability that are key to adoption.”

Solo: Engine Yard’s Ruby Expertise in the Amazon Cloud

The new Solo offering is built on Engine Yard’s battle-hardened experience hosting hundreds of applications on the Company’s own internal cloud. By coupling Solo with Amazon EC2, Engine Yard has lowered the price point for customers that want an entry-level service plan without sacrificing the tried-and-true Engine Yard stack.

With Solo, customers benefit from:

• Engine Yard’s years of experience deploying Ruby on Rails applications
• Amazon’s elastic cloud infrastructure
• Seamless automated deployment tailored to running Ruby applications

Solo will be available on Amazon EC2 on January 28. In the future, Engine Yard plans to extend its offering to other cloud platforms. For more information, visit http://engineyard.com/solo.

Vertebra: A Platform for the Cloud

The idea behind Vertebra is to orchestrate effective communication and coherent operations among many autonomous agents in many clouds. It is designed for programmers and system administrators who want to write functional, scalable and, most importantly, manageable applications for the cloud.

Vertebra can be used for automating the cloud as well as for writing distributed, real-time applications. The platform stands out because of its ability to embrace the differences of many clouds and to automate processes and application management.

Vertebra’s features include:

• A powerful, standard XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) infrastructure
• A security and discovery agent to manage security policy
• A process automation agent to orchestrate operational tasks involving both machines and people
• A system provisioning registry to allow your applications to become self-organizing
• A federated design that allows applications to operate seamlessly and securely in a manner not unlike Internet e-mail
• Distributed auditing/logging capabilities
• Distributed job control for operational awareness

An early release of Vertebra is currently available for download at http://vertebra.engineyard.com. It is licensed under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL).

About Engine Yard

Engine Yard provides the platform and expert support for deploying Ruby and Rails applications to the cloud, giving customers the peace of mind and stability needed for building sites and applications on demand. Engine Yard has a track record of hiring expert talent and fostering open-source innovation, including creating, sponsoring and/or supporting projects like Rails (www.rubyonrails.org), Merb (www.merbivore.com), Rubinius (www.rubini.us), and Vertebra (http://vertebra.engineyard.com). Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., Engine Yard was founded in 2006 and is backed by Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Amazon.com. Visit www.engineyard.com.

Media Contact:

Page One PR for Engine Yard
Chantal Yang
415-875-7494
engineyard@pageonepr.com