Archive for February, 2009

We just pushed a new release of Solo, our Rails in the cloud platform. This release is a big one and includes an exciting feature that we’ve been working on for a while. This release allows you to manage your own custom chef recipes in addition to our default set.

<p>This means that anything we have not yet automated, you can automate yourself. Making Solo a fully programmable deployment platform capable of running pretty much <strong>anything</strong> you can imagine and cook up a chef recipe for.</p>


<p>This release also includes many bug fixes and ui tweaks and has a gem you can install to interact with Solo from the command line when you don&#8217;t want to go into the web interface.</p>


<p>Last week I forgot to blog but we also released a full cron job management interface you can see here:</p>


<p><a href="https://cloud.engineyard.com/system/cron.mov">Cron job management</a></p>


<p>And here is a screencast for getting started with custom chef recipes and Solo:</p>


<p><a href="https://cloud.engineyard.com/system/ey-recipes.mov">Getting Started with Custom Chef Recipes on Engine Yard Solo</a></p>


<p>We&#8217;ve settled into a nice schedule of development here and will be releasing new solo features every monday, so stay tuned for what&#8217;s next!</p>

We just pushed out a new release of Solo, our new Engine Yard on AWS platform. Here is a list of highlights:

<ul>
<li>Added Rack application support for both Nginx/Mongrel and Apache/Passenger stacks. This means you can easily deploy any rack based Ruby app including Sinatra, Ramaze, Mack or any other Ruby web app that uses rack as the web server interface.</li>
    <li>Cleaned up some UI defects and added some nice icons and general UX improvements.</li>
    <li>Multi application support improvements. You can now add an app to a running instance and hit the little gear icon to re-apply configuration changes. This will install any new gems or packages as well as setup any new apps you have added.</li>
    <li>Added GitHub deploy keys, after you setup a new instance you will see a little golden key icon with a green arrow on it for each of your environments. Click this to grab your GitHub deploy key that you can paste into GitHub in order to deploy private repos.</li>
    <li>Numerous bug fixes to our chef recipe set, including fixups for ssh keys and known_hosts permissions problems as well as fixes to our nginx recipes and updating passenger to the latest and greatest.</li>
    <li>We also made sign ups completely automated. For the first week after launch we were manually allowing folks into the app in order to not get overwhelmed with new sign ups. We have removed this step from the sign up, so now if you go to <a href="http://cloud.engineyard.com">http://cloud.engineyard.com</a> you will be directed to a page where you can sign up and immediately use the app without having to wait for us to approve you.</li>
</ul>


<p>Stay tuned here for more features as we push things out to bring this platform to new heights. We have many more cool things in the works to make this the easiest way to get a flexible, best practices, production Ruby deployment setup.</p>