What is Engine Yard?

Launching a cloud application and performing maintenance can be an effortless experience with the right platform as a service offering.

Engine Yard is a popular choice among business owners and developers worldwide for what it offers. Read on to get a detailed look into the PaaS below.

What is Engine Yard?

Engine Yard is a widely used platform as a service offering used for automating, tweaking, and deploying cloud applications.

Engine Yard was established in 2006 by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Jayson Vantuyl, and Lance Walley. It is a company with offices around the world and a growing user base. Alternatives of Engine Yard include platforms such as Heroku and the Google App Engine.

The platform relies on technologies such as PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails, and Node.js for small-scale and large-scale deployments in the cloud. It includes a variety of powerful features, including backups, load balancing, database replication, and cloning.

Engine Yard is one of the popular choices for application developers’ needs for several reasons: its independent architecture, the level of control it provides, and self-containment.

Applications that utilize Engine Yard’s PaaS are contained independently and do not have to share VMs or infrastructure. As a result, there are very few issues caused due to other users.

Engine Yard applications run on infrastructures like Windows Azure or Amazon Web Services directly. Hence, platform outages are handled efficiently, enabling users to run applications.

Its users can easily perform environment and application deployment customization. Engine Yard makes use of MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, along with AWS Elastic Block Store and AWS Simple Storage Service.

Users can also control and schedule their application updates and implement flexible Chef recipes for configuring applications.

Engine Yard Advantages

• Allows the developer to focus on code instead of infrastructure

Engine Yard enables its users to lay stress on creating quality code. They do not have to worry about managing and maintaining.

• Enhance the productivity of the cloud app development team

The features, functionality, and integrations offered by Engine Yard can facilitate better productivity and efficiency for cloud application development. 

• Support for Modern Open Source Languages

Engine Yard offers extensive support for multiple open source languages, making it convenient for users to perform flexible development and deployment. 

Engine Yard Features

• Scale automatically

Engine Yard lets users perform automatic scaling of their applications without any provisioning. Infrastructure scaling is automatic by defining business rules. Custom app metrics of Engine Yard are useful for scaling. 

• Stay up to date once you deploy your environment

Engine Yard provides frequent updates and fixes to users after a deployment has been made. Security patches and improvements are rolled out, and automatic security configurations are made to ensure the best results.

• Get automated monitoring and alerts

Engine Yard performs intelligent application performance monitoring, giving comprehensive overviews of how applications function and work during production.

This is useful in enhancing application operations. Users can receive access to automatic alerts for application resource usage irregularities, failures, and more. Engine Yard lets users run their custom alerts. 

• Multiple coding languages

Engine Yard provides support for multiple coding languages and is not limited to Ruby. Users can deploy different application types, including Python, Node.js, and PHP.

Engine Yard Pricing

Engine Yard has several cost-effective plans for users. 

• Container Usage 

This is a plan starting at $49/month for each OCU, which is prorated to the second. An Optimized Container Unit or OCU is a container that utilizes 1GB RAM and an equivalent CPU. 

• Platform Fee 

Engine Yard platform fee is $800/month for one private cluster. It is prorated to the hour. 

• Standard plan 

Users can get started for free and get 12 hours of support for 5 days a week. 

• Premium

The Premium plan is suitable for handling production workloads of more than $800, equivalent to 20 percent container usage. Users get access to 24×7 support and prompt responses. 

• Platinum 

The Platinum plan is most suitable for mission-critical applications. It is most suitable for more than $1,200 or 30 percent container usage. Platinum comes with full-stack support, 24×7 support, and instant support. 

• Engine Yard Cloud

Instances: Similar to EC2 pricing, where sample pricing is counted on 720 hours of US East Region usage. Prices range between $61 to $138.

SUPPORT: (I) Standard support for Engine Yard is available at $150/month for one instance. (II) Premium support for Engine Yard can be availed at a rate of $300/month. (III) Platinum support is available for $400/month for each instance

Conclusion

Engine Yard offers various powerful features and functionalities for the application deployment and management needs of businesses. Take a look at what it has to offer and choose the right plan for your needs. 

FAQ