Announcement: New Engine Yard Private Cloud Infrastructure

Today is an exciting day at Engine Yard, and I wanted you hear about it from me first. We’ve selected Terremark, a major hosting and infrastructure provider, to provide the infrastructure for our next generation private cloud services.

For Engine Yard Cloud (Amazon Web Services) customers, this move will have no impact on you whatsoever.

When we opened for business more than three years ago, racking and stacking our own hardware wasn’t really a choice: being self-funded well before the concept of cloud computing existed, doing it ourselves was the only way we could introduce our customers to our vision for application deployment and management.

How times have changed! Infrastructure vendors now agree with most of the concepts that we pioneered back then, eliminating the need for us to do it ourselves. We’ve always felt that specializing in Ruby on Rails and the surrounding stack would allow us to make deploying and scaling Rails applications as easy and efficient as it is to create those applications.

Today’s announcement will allow us to further focus on enabling our customers to leverage today’s and tomorrow’s rapidly evolving infrastructure and providing the best Rails Platform-as-a-Service technologies and support.

While there are many advantages to the Terremark infrastructure, we’re most excited about their sophisticated fibre-channel storage area network. The Terremark SAN affords greater reliability and substantially higher throughput than our current storage system; we know that our customers will see great benefit and peace of mind from this.

Terremark has an excellent track record supporting the needs of large enterprise and federal government agencies. Their datacenters have SAS 70 level II, PCI and HIPAA certifications, and we’re confident that our private cloud customers will find this new infrastructure meets the most demanding application requirements.

Over the next six months, we will migrate all current Slice, Fractional Cluster and Dedicated Cluster environments that currently reside on the Engine Yard private cloud to Terremark.

At a high level, not much will change for our private cloud customers. In particular, I want to emphasize that there are no changes in your support team or support processes.

Based on our extensive planning with Terremark, we expect migrations to require minimal effort for our private cloud customers.

If you’re a private cloud customer, you will hear from your Engine Yard account manager in the next few weeks to discuss a migration plan that makes sense for you.