Users of cloud computing frequently talk about its advantages; those include lower capital expenditures, programmable infrastructure, and the power of agile deployment. One thing that doesn't get as much attention though, is how the advantages of Moore's law are significantly magnified by using the cloud. After all, while buying infrastructure might lock you into using the same equipment for the next few years, using a cloud service means that customers get standardized instance sizes, and the infrastructure provider can refresh the underlying hardware a lot faster.

Here at Engine Yard, we've been aggressively passing these savings along to our customers. A few weeks ago we dropped instance prices by aggregating a pool of EC2 reserved instances, and taking advantage of Amazon's just-released consolidated billing feature to get reduced costs for these instances. Last week, we passed through a savings in outbound bandwidth pricing—upto a 20% decrease across all tiers of usage.

Today we're announcing that we'll be dropping the monthly minimum for using Engine Yard Cloud. This is a direct response to feedback from users working on projects that haven't yet deployed to production. We now know that many of you are using Engine Yard Cloud for development and staging environments pre-launch, where costs don't quite make it to $25. We agree—things should be different, and so starting today that minimum goes away, and we move to being a completely pay-as-you-go platform.

Run your instances only when you need them, and pay only for what you use, regardless of whether you're a small group of developers building the next big Rails application, or a production environment serving millions of users.

So there you have it: three price decreases in just the last month. Stay tuned for more—there are exciting new features in the pipeline, and we can't wait to tell you about them!

Attendee James McElhiney beat me to the punch with his review, but I still wanted to take a few minutes to talk about how things went.

We started with Boston, and then moved to Chicago, Austin, Los Angeles and Seattle. Our partners Amazon Web Services, CVSDude, New Relic and Soasta joined us for the trip, meeting with various customers, developers and managers. The crowd was varied, highly technical, and despite the early-morning start, had great energy.

The Roadshow was all about performance, and between the presentations and audience questions, we covered close to everything you'd need to know to meet and exceed your performance goals. Some specifics:

Tom Mornini and I presented Engine Yard's value proposition, along with a live demo of the Engine Yard Cloud platform. Tom focused on end-user performance and the very significant impact it can have on business metrics, while I went into detail on some performance metrics that should be relevant to all rails developers, highlighting how Engine Yard Cloud can help users scale in the cloud.

Next New Relic walked us through RPM, and how they use it internally to monitor, well, RPM. Self-referential coolness aside, it was a great way to see how a tool can help you identify the bottlenecks in your application, while still remaining easy to setup and maintain. When the first audience question started with "I'm signing up for your service even as I ask this..." we knew things were on the right track.

CVSDude's Willie Wang presented on enterprise-grade source control management, and how their solutions can help achieve agility in deployments. This is a key component of performance optimization—agile deployments enable us to fix performance problems faster and deliver features to customers more effectively. With Git support in their near-term roadmap, CVSDude was a great addition for our Rails audience.

Many of the attendees were customers of Amazon AWS, and Mike Culver's presentations described the value proposition of AWS very well. The Amazon team had a busy week—with newly announced services, instance types and a price reduction (which we at Engine Yard immediately passed along to our customers). As expected, a lot of the questions were around their new announcements, and Mike explained how each of these increased the value proposition of cloud computing even more.

Finally, Soasta's Dave Murphy had a great presentation on load testing using Soasta Cloud Test. Some of his numbers were particularly impressive—seeing them use cloud infrastructure to deploy multi-million user load tests on live production environments really brought home the value of using the cloud model. Tools like CloudTest, in conjunction with Engine Yard, can make it trivial for users to test deployments that would have been impossible to test before.

For me personally, the roadshow was a great way to meet customers, developers and spend cycles understanding their needs better. The biggest takeaway for me was that customers really care about scalability, but realize that they add most value by focusing on user happiness. This was exactly the philosophy we used while designing Engine Yard Cloud—we want you to continue to focus on features that add value to your products, and leave all your scalability, performance and agility needs to the Engine Yard Cloud platform.

If you missed the Roadshow, be sure to register for our upcoming Engine Yard Cloud Demo Webinar; I'll be walking through some of the topics covered at the Roadshow and taking questions.

We look forward to visiting more cities soon. Until then, enjoy the presentations, and send us your comments and feedback!

1. Engine Yard Cloud is now out of beta and in general release!
2. We're introducing Premium Support for Engine Yard Cloud, with 24x7 proactive monitoring and trouble-shooting for production applications
3. Solo and Flex pricing plans have been unified into a single Engine Yard Cloud plan
   • Pricing for resources is at the old "Solo" level for everyone
   • Paid support is now optional and available to all users, with a three month minimum commitment

Now that you've got the broad strokes, let's jump into the details.

Announcing Engine Yard Cloud

Engine Yard Solo has been available since January, and hundreds of customers have used Solo to successfully deploy their production Rails applications. We rolled out Engine Yard Flex in early July, with numerous new features and a business-hours support offering. Flex has been in beta since that release, with several dedicated beta customers using it for mission-critical applications.

Today, Engine Yard Cloud enters general release. Engine Yard Cloud unifies the features of Solo and Flex into a single offering. With recently released features like master-slave databases, URL monitoring and customizable utility instances, Engine Yard Cloud is a flexible, productive, powerful platform for applications at every stage of  their life-cycle.

Premium Support

For some of you, there are no slow days; your app needs to be up and running all the time. Premium Support is designed for you. Premium Support provides around the clock access to Engine Yard expert support via ticket and phone. And not only do we provide 24x7 responses for all urgent tickets, but we also monitor your applications proactively, taking action on all alerts that your environments generate.

Adding Premium Support to your existing Engine Yard Cloud account is easy: navigate to the Account Management section on your dashboard and edit your support plan selection. Premium Support is now available to all Engine Yard Cloud accounts, regardless of configuration. It requires a three month minimum commitment. More details on our Premium Support are available at Engine Yard Cloud support.

Unified and Reduced Pricing Plan

When we released Solo and Flex, our intention that the two plans would attract distinctly different users. Solo was for development stage applications, and Flex was for production applications at scale. As time went on though, customer feedback and behavior let us know that this was not the right division. Many Solo customers wanted access to Flex features like unlimited environments, and Flex customers were sometimes scaling to very high traffic for applications that they didn't want under a production support plan. Some Solo customers wanted to burst to Flex-level scale, and conversely, some Flex customers wanted to hibernate their application on a single instance. But upgrading and downgrading pricing plans was a hassle. As a result, we've simplified, streamlined and redelivered our offering.

Starting today, there will only be one pricing plan: the Engine Yard Cloud Plan. Both Solo and Flex beta customers will be automatically migrated to the new plan starting with the October billing period.

In a nutshell, there are three things you need to know about the structure of the new and improved offering:

1. All users have access to all features. You want load-balanced highly-available large-instance application and database clusters with advanced monitoring?  You got it!
2. Flex customers keep their beta promotional pricing—the new Engine Yard Cloud pricing level is set at the current Solo level.
3. Two support offerings -- Premium and Standard support -- from the Engine Yard expert support team are now available to all users as an optional paid add-on, with a 3-month minimum commitment.

For more details on the new unified pricing, go to the Engine Yard Cloud pricing page.

General availability, Premium Support, and a single unified pricing plan. Three big milestones for Engine Yard Cloud. It's all available now, so poke around your existing account, or sign up today, and as always, we'd love to hear your feedback!