Engine Yard Blog

As described in our V5 announcement post, Engine Yard now supports Docker.

When designing support for Docker in our custom Chef cookbooks, we decided to build on what the Chef community has already built.

The Docker cookbook in the Chef Supermarket provides custom resources to define how your instances will run, download, or build Docker containers. This makes it straightforward to deploy Docker containers into your utility instances.

To see how straightforward it is to deploy Docker on Engine Yard, check out our collection of sample Docker recipes.

As part of our work on this, Engine Yard also gave back to the the community. We created a new custom resource to install the latest binaries from the official Docker tarball packages. This allows you to utilize the latest versions of Docker without waiting on Engine Yard's hardened Gentoo portage tree.

To install a new version of Docker, just add this to your Chef recipe:

docker_installation_tarball "default" do
  source "https://get.docker.com/builds/Linux/x86_64/docker-1.12.0.tgz"
  checksum "3dd07f65ea4a7b4c8829f311ab0213bca9ac551b5b24706f3e79a97e22097f8b"
  version "1.12.0"
end

For more info, check out our pull request for this feature.

We're thrilled to announce the Engine Yard PaaS V5 release!

This is a platform-wide upgrade that comes with a long list of new features, the latest versions of Ruby, PHP, NodeJS, and much more.

In addition, once you've written your application in the language of your choice, you can choose to deploy it on our new Docker infrastructure.

Why Us?

Engine Yard is ten years old. For a decade, the support team at Engine Yard has been taking care of application developers like you. Twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, Engine Yard provides deep engineering, database, and operational support to thousands of customers.

We believe in what we do, so we measure 100% of our support calls and publish the results publicly on our web site. With over one billion AWS hours run on Engine Yard, we have proven we can get your software deployed fast, and keep it running successfully. Every time.

Here's what Charles Ju, CTO of PennyPop, has to say about V5:

"PennyPop has been using Engine Yard for several years now and we're very satisfied with their service. With Engine Yard, we can easily deploy changes across multiple instances with the touch of a button, which saves us tremendous amounts of time. The switch to v5 allows us to work much more effectively by providing us the ability to connect to the latest technology, including Postgres 9.5. Engine Yard also has superior customer service, which allows us to minimize troubleshooting time so we can focus our efforts on our game development."

If you’ve been following along on the Deis blog, they published a post showing you how to build a custom Kubernetes scheduler with Elixir.

That post was inspired by a recent talk by Kelsey Hightower.

Kelsey also tweeted:

It's not that everyone should go out and build custom schedulers, but they should know how if they need too.

— Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) June 8, 2016

I would take this logic and apply it to autoscalers too.

While everyone doesn’t need to go and build their own autoscaler, it can be beneficial to understand how they work. And one of the best ways to gain that experience is by trying your hand at writing your own.

DevOps is a young but fast evolving discipline.

Like other young practices, the community is still discovering itself. As more people learn from their experience and incorporate insights from other backgrounds, DevOps continues to mature.

DevOpsDays is one of those places the DevOps community gathers together and shares this knowledge.

This year at DevOpsDays, lots of people were stepping back and building a framework around the practice of DevOps. We even say people starting to use math to help model DevOps.

We use EngineYard to host RailsAsAService.com and it's been an incredible experience that goes beyond just web hosting.

EngineYard and Rails As A Service share much of the same underlying DNA, and when you can make a compatible choice like this in your business, amazing things happen.

There is a tremendous amount of choice in web hosts today, but at RaaS we deal only with Ruby on Rails projects. And in this space, EngineYard excels. Their custom platform has been built to support Ruby on Rails projects easily, and it is effortless to bring a new project online.

But really, this is just the start. There are other companies that support Rails projects. What makes EngineYard different, however, is the same thing that makes RaaS work so well. Skilled staff with results you can depend on. I know that when I eventually run into issues with RaaS, I can depend on EngineYard's staff, and the experience they have supporting many other Rails applications, to resolve the problems I run into. And they can do it with more speed and efficiency than I can provide for myself.

Why? Because having a staff dedicated to supporting the strange issues that come up with Rails applications makes their input so valuable. It's the experience they gain from doing this again and again, across so many different projects, that makes them so efficient.

Using EngineYard to host and provide hosting support for Rails As A Service is like having an insurance policy against the chaos that inevitably finds its way into Rails apps. We don't know when we will need to rely on their staff, and hope we never have to, but if we find ourselves in a position where we need help—Engine Yard will be there.

Having Engine Yard there means we don't need to build, maintain, or grow these support skills in-house. We can stay focused on our goal of providing fully integrated upgrades to older Rails apps without needing to worry about deployment or devops on our own application. And it is this combination that makes EngineYard and Rails As A Service a match made in heaven.