Engine Yard
Cloud Takes On A Ruby Hue

Ruby on Rails developers want to focus on writing Web applications, not on the underlying software and systems needed to support them. Engine Yard's Ruby-in-the-cloud service lets them do that.

"We're 100% Ruby on Rails," providing 24/7 support for Ruby on Rails applications, says CTO Tom Mornini, one of the 2-year-old startup's four co-founders. Engine Yard's customers write the apps, and "we flip the switch" to deploy and support them, Mornini says. Applications on Engine Yard can be used by a handful of people or tens of thousands.

WePlay.com, a social networking site for youth sports that was launched in March, is an early adopter. Its investors include Derek Jeter, Payton Manning, and LeBron James. WePlay has an internal team of Ruby developers, but no systems administrators or IT support staff, says VP of engineering Luke Melia. If WePlay had used a general hosting company like Rackspace, it would also need to have an IT pro with Ruby expertise on staff for issues such as backup and database management, Melia says. But Engine Yard takes care of all that and makes recommendations on architecture and scaling, he says.

That worked without a hitch when WePlay's traffic spiked during a New York Yankees game in April after a broadcaster mentioned that Jeter was involved in WePlay. "Traffic went through the roof," Melia says. "It was probably three or four times our previous peak," and Engine Yard handled it smoothly.

In July, Engine Yard closed $15 million in Series B funding led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Amazon as well as Benchmark Capital, which had invested $3.5 million in Engine Yard in January. (In August, Amazon joined in a second-round investment in cloud startup Elastra. See "A Dual-Purpose Server".)

The funding will help Engine Yard expand beyond Ruby on Rails. The startup is working on a development platform, called Vertebra, for Ruby on Rails and other applications, says Mornini. It will be the first development platform "targeted to scale applications intended to live in the cloud," he adds.

Engine Yard provides its services from two leased data centers, one on each coast. Mornini says Engine Yard eventually will move out of those data centers and offer its services on top of a cloud service such as Amazon's EC2.

-- Marianne Kolbasuk McGee

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