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Five Practical Benefits

1. Cost Effective: With pay as you go pricing, Engine Yard AppCloud can deliver significant cost savings because if you stop using a resource, you stop paying for it. If you’re curious and want to take Engine Yard AppCloud for a spin, you can start with a small instance with no monthly minimum. Please see our pricing page for more detailed information.
2. Ease-of-Use: An easy to use web-interface means that you can have your first application running five minutes after signup. Just point your source code to Engine Yard AppCloud and go. Everything you need from web and application servers to monitoring all happens automatically.
3. Built-in Reliability: Configuring your cloud environment for redundancy is simple and easy. With Engine Yard AppCloud, your application servers are automatically load balanced for reliability, and since the configuration of your environment is fully automated you can recreate it instantly.
4. Works with you: Engine Yard AppCloud is unique because it works with full-featured virtual machines. So you can take the packages you already know and love and use them on top of a real file system. There’s no weird database that you have to use. It’s just MySQL.
5. Make Scaling Trivial: With the Rails Cloud, scaling is easy. With just a few clicks through the Engine Yard AppCloud UI you can increase or decrease the number and size of your instances to meet demand. Unlike traditional application deployments where the safe decision is to massively over-provision ahead of time (just in case), Engine Yard AppCloud eliminates provisioning headaches while giving you the flexibility to scale when you need it.

Five Strategic Benefits

1. Absolute Architecture Control: With Engine Yard Cloud, it’s just pieces of code that define the infrastructure. Write deployment recipes in a Ruby domain specific language. Then change the recipe, and with a single click you can change your entire application infrastructure. Imagine being able to rapidly optimize your application by iterating through architectural alternatives.
2. Make Scaling Trivial: With the Rails Cloud, scaling is easy. Just decide your cost/benefit tradeoff at peak load levels and set your scaling rules accordingly. And the decisions are always reversible, unlike traditional application deployments where the safe decision is to massively over-provision ahead of time (just in case.)
3. Bring Agile to Deployment: Chances are that you’ve adopted some or all of Agile development best practices over the last few years. If so, you have to be frustrated that the ability to rapidly, and iteratively build applications has always stopped short of deploying them to production application architecture. There’s still an end-of-project big bang deployment. With a Rails Cloud, however, you can build your architecture as you go. You can even auto-deploy to a staging environment every time your code passes an integration test.
4. Enable Business Innovation: The Rails Cloud can literally change your business, opening up new possibilities for marketing promotion, customer engagement and data analytics. A week-long marketing promotion that attracts tens of millions of visits, can cost as little as a few thousand dollars in infrastructure costs. A data analysis run that needs a thousand CPU’s to finish in an hour, can cost as little as a few hundred dollars.
5. Accelerate Development: Developing and running on the Rails cloud just means faster development. Environments are always pristine and can be effortlessly reset. And you’ll be using Rails — the development framework that delivers anywhere from 2x to 5x faster development productivity.