December 20, 2013: This Week at Engine Yard

Wait, where did 2013 go?

–Tasha Drew, Product Manager Engineering Updates

We have two exciting new sets of features out under early access this week! As always, your feedback is super important to us (send us suggestions in the Early Access Feedback Forum!), and if you have any questions or need any assistance, open a ticket and our friendly Support engineers will help you out!

Access Control by Environment

We have released the ability to control access by Environment within the UI into Early Access this week! Once you enable this feature and navigate to your account settings page like so:

Then scroll down to the portion of the Accounts Setting page where you can invite people as collaborators to your account. You will now see collaborators organized by access level: Account owners, administrators, collaborators, and pending invitations. You can edit collaborators access levels from this page by clicking the edit button.

If you , you will arrive at a page with new options:

• invite someone to become a co-owner of the account, including access to view billing (you can only invite a new owner if you are yourself an owner)
• give a new collaborator access to only some environments
• give a new collaborator access to all environments and future environments automatically

If you choose to give a new collaborator access to only some environments, you can select which ones in the following workflow:

We’re very happy to make this available for customers, as it’s been a top requested feature in the forums. Please let us know how it works for you!

Java in Early Access

My cohort in Product and Shenanigans, Richard Watson, announced that our Java 7 stack is now in Early Access! It also shows off our shiny new UI (which is still a work in progress for many other features, at ui.engineyard.com). Check it out, deploy a Java application, and let us know what you think!

The early access Java product allows you to configure environments with groups of servers running Ubuntu (12.04 LTS) in three roles:

• application servers with Tomcat 7 or Jetty 9 Servlet containers running on Java 7
• database servers with MySQL 5.5
• load balancer servers using HAProxy 1.4.24

Check out our documentation to deploy your first Java application on Engine Yard.

Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

All of our Engine Yarders wish you a very happy Festivus!

Articles of Interest

An Australian entrepreneur teamed up with an enthusiastic Romanian teenager to build a human sized car out of legos that traveled up to 12mph, powered by air.

The team at Pinterest posted a beautiful piece about the work and design that went into their Place Pins.

Brad Haynes describes the challenge of designing at Salesforce with his “Designing Products that Scale.”