Three Big Announcements about Engine Yard Cloud

Today is a big day for Engine Yard Cloud, and we’re excited to share three major milestones with you. I’ll go into each in detail, but let’s start with the headlines:

1. Engine Yard Cloud is now out of beta and in general release!
2. We’re introducing Premium Support for Engine Yard Cloud, with 24x7 proactive monitoring and trouble-shooting for production applications
3. Solo and Flex pricing plans have been unified into a single Engine Yard Cloud plan
   • Pricing for resources is at the old “Solo” level for everyone
   • Paid support is now optional and available to all users, with a three month minimum commitment

Now that you’ve got the broad strokes, let’s jump into the details.

Announcing Engine Yard Cloud

Engine Yard Solo has been available since January, and hundreds of customers have used Solo to successfully deploy their production Rails applications. We rolled out Engine Yard Flex in early July, with numerous new features and a business-hours support offering. Flex has been in beta since that release, with several dedicated beta customers using it for mission-critical applications.

Today, Engine Yard Cloud enters general release. Engine Yard Cloud unifies the features of Solo and Flex into a single offering. With recently released features like master-slave databases, URL monitoring and customizable utility instances, Engine Yard Cloud is a flexible, productive, powerful platform for applications at every stage of their life-cycle.

Premium Support

For some of you, there are no slow days; your app needs to be up and running all the time. Premium Support is designed for you. Premium Support provides around the clock access to Engine Yard expert support via ticket and phone. And not only do we provide 24x7 responses for all urgent tickets, but we also monitor your applications proactively, taking action on all alerts that your environments generate.

Adding Premium Support to your existing Engine Yard Cloud account is easy: navigate to the Account Management section on your dashboard and edit your support plan selection. Premium Support is now available to all Engine Yard Cloud accounts, regardless of configuration. It requires a three month minimum commitment. More details on our Premium Support are available at Engine Yard Cloud support.

Unified and Reduced Pricing Plan

When we released Solo and Flex, our intention that the two plans would attract distinctly different users. Solo was for development stage applications, and Flex was for production applications at scale. As time went on though, customer feedback and behavior let us know that this was not the right division. Many Solo customers wanted access to Flex features like unlimited environments, and Flex customers were sometimes scaling to very high traffic for applications that they didn’t want under a production support plan. Some Solo customers wanted to burst to Flex-level scale, and conversely, some Flex customers wanted to hibernate their application on a single instance. But upgrading and downgrading pricing plans was a hassle. As a result, we’ve simplified, streamlined and redelivered our offering.

Starting today, there will only be one pricing plan: the Engine Yard Cloud Plan. Both Solo and Flex beta customers will be automatically migrated to the new plan starting with the October billing period.

In a nutshell, there are three things you need to know about the structure of the new and improved offering:

1. All users have access to all features. You want load-balanced highly-available large-instance application and database clusters with advanced monitoring? You got it!
2. Flex customers keep their beta promotional pricing—the new Engine Yard Cloud pricing level is set at the current Solo level.
3. Two support offerings – Premium and Standard support – from the Engine Yard expert support team are now available to all users as an optional paid add-on, with a 3-month minimum commitment.

For more details on the new unified pricing, go to the Engine Yard Cloud pricing page.

General availability, Premium Support, and a single unified pricing plan. Three big milestones for Engine Yard Cloud. It’s all available now, so poke around your existing account, or sign up today, and as always, we’d love to hear your feedback!