Today we are announcing an update to our recently re-launched website. This update has been a long time coming. Years, in fact.

Over the last 7 years, Engine Yard has been a contributor to different open source projects and communities. While we’re not looking for accolades, it’s important to highlight contributions we have made, and the positive impact we feel it has had, as we hope to inspire other teams, organizations and companies to see how they can make a contribution of their own.

And so today we are launching the community section of our site, where you can find out about the events we’re supporting and speaking at, the open source projects we have contributed to both in terms of code and cash investments, and you can reach out to us to ask for help with organizing community events.

I’ve spent a long time thinking about community and what it means to Engine Yard. I’d like to share some of my thoughts.

What Does Community Even Mean?

Community. It is a word that is used by many tech companies these days to convey different things. To most, it seems like it’s just an umbrella term for “a group of people with a common interest.” But really, it means so much more than that.

Human beings have been doing community for a very, very long time. In fact, you could say it is one of the defining characteristics of our species. It is a system that has evolved with us, and has been a key to our survival. It comes with its own set of basic rules and structures that are universal, and are still true, even today, in our always-on world.

The most successful communities, be they real world and local, or virtual and distributed, all use these rules and structures that are their fundamental building blocks. There are many studies on the subject, but here is my take.

I’ve found that most communities can be described by a structure of:

• core contributors
• active contributors
• passive contributors

I’ve also found that the most successful communities will have elements of:

• vertical and horizontal movement
• self regulation
• leadership, not ownership
• quid pro quo

Core Contributors

We had a bunch of exciting security enhancements announced this week! Need HIPAA? Just ask!

--Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

HIPAA

Customers running healthcare applications on Engine Yard can now enter into a Business Associates Agreement (BAA) with Engine Yard, as well as boot and deploy on dedicated instances, allowing you to meet the requirements for HIPAA and other high security applications. (Engine Yard press release)

Termination protection

Sometimes you just hit the wrong button. Termination protection is a feature that is now in GA on our platform. When enabled on an environment, you are required to re-enter your password before you can terminate an instance or stop an environment.

Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

Thursday, February 27: Our SF headquarters is happy to host the San Francisco Hacker News meetup! We’ll be talking all about machine learning for hackers. Reserve your ticket now as space is expected to fill up fast.

Articles of Interest

A good overview of AWS Storage types and options.

Are you watching the Olympics? Then you are seeing Microsoft Azure in action!

To clarify before getting too far into the politics of the title: this is not a grudge match or a death match. This is not an end-all definitive debate killer. This article serves to take a look at two of the web frameworks available to rubyists and some of the benefits and pitfalls of both. To steal a phrase, "This is not a rebel song." We’ll start by taking a look at each framework.

To begin, a little about Rails. It’s an MVC-based (Model-View-Controller) web framework created in 2004 by David Heinemeier Hansson to give Ruby a way to establish a web presence. The idea was Rails would make developers happier and more efficient while getting Ruby to the web. According to information from 2011/2012, at that point there had been over 7 million downloads of Rails.

Sinatra was created in 2007 by Blake Mizerany and is currently maintained by Konstantin Haase. It took the opposite approach of Rails in that it only has the basics of what you need for a web application. No magic, no unicorns - just simple elegant routes to put your app on the web with a Domain Specific Language (DSL) over a rack layer.

Getting Started:

Happy Valentine’s Day from Engine Yard!

Have you checked out the recently relaunched engineyard.com? You should, the site re-design is gorgeous! Way to go, web team!

 --Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

Postgres 9.3: now in GA!

Postgres 9.3 has been moved from early access into general availability this week, and it is now our default relational database for new environments! Check out our docs to read all about it.

This new version of PostgreSQL has many new features including:

• Writeable foreign data wrappers (FDWs)
• Faster failover
• Materialized views
• Parallel pg_dump to speed backups of large databases

If you have any questions on how to upgrade, or want our professional services team to do an upgrade for you, open a ticket and ask!

ext4 availability!

Now in early access: ext4. The ext4 or fourth extended filesystem is a journaling filesystem for Linux, developed as the successor to ext3. Enabling the ext4 Linux File System Early Access feature provides you the option of having the /data and /db volumes formatted with ext4 instead of ext3.

Check out the release notes for our regularly scheduled stack updates and associated docs!

Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

Tuesday, February 18th - Friday, February 21st: DeveloperWeek in San Francisco starts next week. Your friendly neighborhood PANDA, Edward Chiu will be giving a short talk on Engine Yard and cloud development. Stop by and give him a high five!

Friday, February 21st - Our PHP crew of Slava, Davey, Noelle, and Product Manager Josh Pederson are London bound for PHPUK! We’re super excited for this years edition, as we’ll have a whole room dedicated to talking about all things Cloud. We’ll also have free coffee, t-shirts, and other swag, so you won’t want to miss it.

Articles of Interest

Anil Dash reports back after a year in which he only re-tweeted womens’ tweets (and Prince, occasionally).

The Olympics demonstrate that live demos are dangerous, even when you’ve practiced flawlessly for hours (or months) ahead of time.

I’m pleased to announce that the first Engine Yard community grant for 2014 will be a $10,000 investment paid directly to open source developers. I am also pleased to announce that to achieve this, we have decided to use Gittip.

Philanthropy for the 21st Century

Engine Yard has given over $5.5 million to the open source community in the past six years. This has mostly taken the form of employing people to work on critical open source projects full time, or via grants, and we continue to engage in this form of support. But this year, we set a further goal for ourselves: to investigate, and use, exciting new methods to help the community.

Gittip is a relatively young, open company that uses a range of experimental ideas to give financial support to individuals. We examined these ideas, and found several reasons why Gittip was a great match for Engine Yard’s community goals for the year: