Engine Yard Cloud Features and Benefits
Managed Application Runtime
Engine Yard Cloud provides you with a pre-integrated, pre-tested Ruby on Rails technology stack, including web, application and database servers, built-in monitoring and process management, a Rails-optimized linux distribution, in-memory caches and more. All components are monitored for security vulnerabilities and updated continuously as vulnerabilities are discovered and patched.
Monitoring & Alerting
Engine Yard Cloud tracks all the essential resource utilization for your application and alerts you when you need additional capacity, or when your latest application push is behaving poorly. Storage, CPU and memory utilization levels are all tracked for conformance to pre-configured thresholds, and email alerts provide timely warnings.
Seamless Application Capacity Management
Configuring new applications capacity used to be a multi-hour task—now it’s a single click. With Engine Yard Cloud, capacity management is always application aware. Add an additional instance to your application tier, and that instance will automatically deploy with the correct application configuration and join your load-balanced group.
Application Cloning
With Engine Yard Cloud, you're no longer forced to maintain a persistent staging environment. With a single click, you can clone your full production environment or shut it down—even if your application is running across twenty different instances with multiple volumes and databases.
Auto Deploy-From-Source
Engine Yard provides seamless integration with source code management. Simply add a special comment to your source code check-in and you can have it automatically deploy to a staging or test environment. Now your whole team can always see the current application version.
Application Templates
One of the essential concepts of an Application Cloud is that all the information required to reproduce application capacity is stored in a configuration management system. With Engine Yard Cloud, you can easily manage application configurations with our application templates, which encapsulate source code, Ruby gems, linux packages and other essential details.
Extensible Configurations
If you need to use a component or package that Engine Yard does not install or configure by default, you can write a configuration recipe to extend our configuration management system. A configuration recipe is a simple Ruby-based domain specific language that allows you to specify installation and configuration steps for any package you need to install.
Self-Service Provisioning
Use the Engine Yard Cloud user interface to add and subtract instances on demand. Our Cloud dashboard makes it easy to see the status of your application, and to add and remove capacity or deploy new application versions.
Replicated Database Tier
As your application scales, so should your database. With Engine Yard Cloud, adding a database read replica is as simple as clicking on a button. Scale out by adding more replicas, which can be used to perform complex analytics, backups and maintain high availability without sacrificing on application performance.
Utility Tier
Most serious web applications require specialized components outside of the application and database tier. With Engine Yard Cloud, you can easily create a utility instance tier and associate configuration recipes to it. Simply add new servers to do repeatable deploys of custom applications or to offload complex processing to dedicated servers.
URL Availability Monitoring
Serious production applications require all services to be available at all times. Engine Yard Cloud monitors all your essential services, including configurable application URLs, and alerts you when there is any unexpected downtime.
You can see the entire feature list here.