New on the Engine Yard Cloud: Flex!

Today we’re formally announcing the next version of Engine Yard Cloud for Rails web developers and web teams! Our new feature plan is called Flex (get it? because it’s Flexible!).

With this new addition, we now have two feature plans for the Engine Yard Cloud: Solo and Flex. Both are built on a common model of instant provisioning of base images, combined with automated recipe-driven application configuration, and source code control integration. Capturing all the application state in a central repository makes features like environment cloning super easy to implement. On top of that, resource monitoring keeps your capacity usage under control.

Solo remains an excellent plan for developers and non-critical applications that only need to run on a single instance. Beyond the basics of Solo, Flex adds some awesome capabilities for higher traffic production applications, including but not limited to:

• Easy to manage application clusters (one click capacity changes)
• Application cloning for easy staging and test environment creation
• Automated scaling and self-healing capabilities
• and Fail-over database instances

In addition, Flex adds the option of two levels of world class Engine Yard Rails support: Standard (12 x 5) and Premium (24 x 7) Support. Premium support includes proactive monitoring of your application complete with issue trouble-shooting.

If you’re interested in learning more about the product features, you definitely want to check out the video of this morning’s developer webinar, where Engine Yard Cloud engineers Ezra Zygmuntowicz and John Crosby put the Cloud through its paces: the video will be uploaded to the Engine Yard site shortly, and we’ll update this post and tweet about it. Check out our feature page for details, and enjoy Flex!