Why Use the Engine Yard Rails Application Cloud?

The Five Practical Reasons

1. Cost Effective: Just pay for what you use. Stop using a resource? Stop paying for it. 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 Cloud and go. Everything you need from web and application servers to monitoring all happens in the background
3. Built-in Reliability: You don’t have to go through the hassle of configuring redundancy. With the Rails Cloud, application servers are automatically load balanced for reliability, and new databases are always configured with a failover replica. And, because all your environment configuration is stored separately, you can reproduce your entire application instantly.
4. Works with you: The Engine Yard Rails Cloud is different 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. Support from the Rails Experts: Engine Yard knows Rails. We’re active contributors to both Ruby and Rails. We even maintain the workhorse Ruby 1.8.6 version. And three years of deploying some of the world’s largest Rails sites means we’ve seen all the issues and answered all the questions.

The Five Strategic Reasons

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.

Learn more about Engine Yard Cloud