Engine Yard Winter Updates!

__Update: Multiple availability zone deployments now available in Alpha. Check out our additional documentation. To sign up for access, go here. __

Greetings! As the weather begins to cool, the team here is keeping warm by continuing to knock out more amazing features for all of you. I wanted to let you all know about some of the great things we have cooking over here at Engine Yard that will make life more awesome than it already is. ###Highly Available, Highly Addictive In talking to many of our customers, partners, and developers, one of the issues that frequently comes up is the ability to stay running when data centers inevitably experience an outage. Last April, one such outage impacted a variety of customers on Amazon Web Services. While we are always striving to improve our service, with our multi-region support, we were able to effectively move many of our impacted customers to Amazon’s US West region while minimizing downtime.

We plan to continue adding new features to further mitigate the effects of outages and disruptions. Currently, our development team is in the process of rolling out multiple availability zone deployments. When you create an application, Engine Yard Cloud will automatically deploy your instances across different availability zones in an Amazon Web Services region. We balance the instances efficiently and ensure that master and slave instances are in separate zones. To further improve reliability, each tier (app server, database, and utility) will be balanced independently. The team is doing some final tests and should have it rolled out in a week or so. We’ll release more information on this soon and will announce availability via our @engineyard twitter account.

For customers with specific high availability requirements, Engine Yard Professional Services can customize an environment to meet your needs. For example, Engine Yard Professional Services recently deployed a high availability solution across two data centers for one our customers and completed a regional failover test with success. Be on the lookout soon for a case study on this initiative. If you would like to learn more, please get in touch with our Professional Services team. ###Need More Data! A couple months ago, our data engineering team laid out a plan to strengthen Engine Yard’s data offerings. In an effort to make more database options available to our customers, the data engineering team released PostgreSQL 9.0 into alpha. After collecting some feedback, the team will be releasing PostreSQL 9.1 as a public beta over the next couple of weeks for all of you to use. PostgreSQL has earned a solid reputation for reliability, data integrity, and performance. As we noted earlier, those using Rails 3.1 can take advantage of significant performance gains using PostgreSQL.

The team also recently released MySQL 5.1 and 5.5 into alpha and will be releasing them as public beta shortly, as well. Please check back soon for news regarding MongoDB, Redis, and more!