Engine Yard Platform
Open Cloud Application Architecture
Based on our experience deploying and managing thousands of scaled web applications, Engine Yard has developed a reference open source architecture. It comprised of technology components with known parameters for scalability, performance and reliability. The Engine Yard architecture treats the Rails application tier as stateless and scale-out. Application state should be persisted to an in-memory cache, or directly to data store. We improve scalability by offloading tasks to background job processors either directly or via a message bus.
The Engine Yard data tier achieves scalability and performance by offloading specialized tasks such as content indexing to a specialist indexing and search component, and by leveraging key-value stores for functional specific storage tasks. Functional partitioning and (if required) application level sharding provides further options for scaling.
For specific components supported in each of these functional areas, please see the current Engine Yard Technology Stack.
