Over the past five years, Engine Yard has built the leading PaaS for Ruby on Rails applications. Today, we provide services that power businesses ranging from fast-growing Web 2.0 start-ups and hyper-growth companies like Groupon to Fortune 500 enterprises. We have thousands of customers in over 40 countries, who consume more than 140 million CPU hours each year. We would like to thank our customers for choosing the Engine Yard platform and for relying on us to help them build great applications.

We’re thrilled with the success we’ve had bringing Ruby on Rails to the cloud. Now, we plan to extend our offering to the great community of PHP developers. We believe it’s essential to deliver deep competence for any language we support in our PaaS. We acquired Orchestra to add this necessary PHP expertise, community engagement, and know-how to Engine Yard and our PaaS. By joining forces with Orchestra, we will provide the best Platform as a Service for PHP.

Ruby on Rails is the core of our business today, and it’s growing rapidly. We’ve built a solid platform through meticulous stack curation, years of experience, customer interaction and an extensive ecosystem. Our customer services team delivers expert technical support, professional services, and training to our worldwide customer base. We will continue to invest in the Ruby on Rails community and our Ruby on Rails stack while extending the benefits of our PaaS experience to the PHP developer community.

To learn more about Engine Yard PaaS and our support of PHP and Ruby on Rails, you can watch the video or read our FAQ. Engine Yard customers can also contact their sales rep for more information by calling 866-518-YARD.

Since we raised the last round of capital, we've built and released Engine Yard Cloud. And we've also continued our strong investment in Ruby and Rails, with a deck of full-time engineers working on Rails 3, Rubinius and most recently JRuby. We now have over 700 customers using Engine Yard, and more sign up everyday. Best of all, customers can now try out our cloud features for just a $25 minimum per month.

With this round of funding (which we expect to be our last), we'll continue to build out the Cloud engineering team, and bring additional support offerings to market around JRuby and Rails. We'll also be looking at international expansion and building out more partnerships with infrastructure providers. Stay tuned! The best is yet to come.

Why JRuby for Engine Yard?

JRuby is a project with accelerating momentum. The JRuby team has done an excellent job over the last many years developing a stable, high performance Ruby implementation that is showing increasing popularity among java developers looking for more productive frameworks. It was clear from talking to developers (particularly enterprise developers) that JRuby -- with the appropriate support and backing -- was a really compelling choice for Ruby adoption.

What's next?

We've worked out a compelling plan with the JRuby team. We plan to introduce commercial product support for JRuby, as well as invest in JRuby documentation. In this way, we aim to greatly accelerate adoption of Ruby (and Rails) in java-based development shops.

Wait, don't you already have a Ruby team? What about Rubinius?

We believe that Rubinius is the future Ruby implementation that will be the highest performance option on the market, and the compelling production option -- even as MRI remains the language reference. We're committed to continuing investment in Rubinius progress. But JRuby offers a unique and easy adoption path today to people and organizations that have committed to the java platform as their "home" -- and the two projects have a continued viable parallel existence, tied together by RubySpec as the community-accepted test-suite for Rubyness.

We're excited about what the future holds for Ruby and Rails, and this development is just another item on the long list of factors that will contribute to our collective success. Thanks to everyone for all the support, and a warm welcome to the JRuby team!

JD

As many of you know, we experienced a severe outage at our west coast data center yesterday; many of our customers were affected and experienced several hours of downtime. Our engineers became aware of the problem as soon as it occurred, and began the relevant data center escalation procedures.

Engine Yard customers rely on us to run and support their business-critical applications, and that includes relying on our selection of vendors. In this case, we have failed to meet our service level agreements with our west coast customers, and we will, of course, be providing customers with the appropriate service credits.

In the attached report, I have detailed yesterday’s issues, as well as the swift steps we are taking to ensure that this does not happen again. We sincerely apologize for this outage, but are more committed than ever to providing the level of service Engine Yard customers have come to expect.

If you have any additional inquiries, members of our technical teams are available to answer any and all questions; emails can be sent to info@engineyard.com.

Here at Engine Yard we are major supporters of Ruby and Rails. We understand that in order to grow, our ecosystem needs a network of reliable and professional service providers, and we intend to deliver.

John Dillon
CEO

What Happened

Yesterday March 30th, at 9:00 a.m. (PST), our west coast data center experienced a loss of internet connectivity. Our support engineers detected the outage immediately and began investigating the cause. Once we confirmed that the cause was connectivity, we posted the first update to our status blog (9:19 a.m.). We continued to inform customers with new posts as new information was communicated from Herakles.

We were in touch with Herakles senior management for updates at 15 minute intervals. Connectivity began to be restored at approximately 1:30 p.m. and all customers were fully restored by 3:45 p.m. The outage affected about two thirds of our customer base.

Why Did It Happen

Our data-center provider — Herakles — maintains redundant internet uplinks with redundant equipment. Normally the failure of a single internet uplink or switch will prompt a failover event, with minimal loss of connectivity. In this case, however, the route processor of one of the redundant switches (a Cisco 6509) malfunctioned. As part of the malfunction, the device stopped seeing its BGP peers as active, and as such, determined them to have failed. As a result, the device incorrectly promoted itself to master switch and stopped passing traffic inbound or outbound. Complicating the matter, the alerts from the malfunctioning switch that should have notified Herakles monitoring systems of the failure were themselves not routed past the switch.

How It Was Repaired

Herakles data center network engineers worked with Cisco on-site engineers and began debugging the failed switch immediately. The first attempt to repair the switch — by replacing its route processor — failed. After additional trouble-shooting steps, the support engineers physically disconnected the malfunctioning switch, forcing the redundant switch to take over as master. This fully restored traffic, but has now left the internet uplink without switch-level redundancy.

Next Steps

Herakles is currently testing a new redundant switch in its test lab, and will install this during a scheduled maintenance window as soon as possible. When we receive notice of the scheduled maintenance window from Herakles, we will immediately communicate this to customers.

Engine Yard Plans

Starting in September 2008, we began the process of adding an alternative provider to our west coast data center. Our choice was to use our east coast data center connectivity provider as an alternative.

Since the new provider did not yet have a presence in Herakles, this process has taken several months to implement. By April 15th, we will be able to offer this provider as an alternative. At that time we will coordinate with customers who wish to move to the new provider.