June 7, 2013: This Week at Engine Yard

Things are pretty busy right now as we ship a bunch of customer enhancements on Engine Yard Cloud and continue with our planned infrastructure abstractions and cluster model improvements. Exciting things to come! In the meantime, here’s what’s available as of this week.

–Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

Now in GA: Application takeover preferences. Based on your application’s customizations, you might not want to use the default application takeover behavior we’ve developed to automatically promote your application slaves when the app master goes away or becomes totally unresponsive for some reason.

Engine Yard Cloud now provides two automated options for replacing capacity in an application takeover situation. We also provide alternatives if you need to handle part or all of an app takeover yourself.

We now have Provisioned IOPs and EBS Optimized instances available for customers to use in Early Access! To enable them for your environment from your cloud dashboard, click the Tools menu -> Early Access, and then enable “EBS Optimized Instances” and “Provisioned IOPs.”

Keep in mind that they work best in tandem, and they will only be an option on instances booted after you enable the feature.

Data Data Data

Databases love I/O and provisioned IOPs and EBS optimized instances are very well suited for applications where the database can use more performance (think backups and snapshots too).

You can enhance the performance of your application by having a volume with provisioned IOPs on the database master. If your application has been already deployed you can add new replicas to the environment (that have this performance boost) and have them promoted to master. As usual don’t hesitate to ask us if PIOPs or EBS optimized instances can give your database a boost. Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

Tuesday, June 11th: Our Buffalo office will be hosting the WNY Ruby Meetup Group. Mark Josef will be providing us with some code katas. Wednesday, June 12th: Our PDX office will be hosting the weekly CoderDojo K-12 night, ably assisted by one of the San Francisco sprint teams, who will be on site for an off site (as it were).

Wednesday, June 12th: Girl Develop It will be doing a Code and Coffee night in our Buffalo office. The participants be focusing on honing their skills and working in groups. Swing by for the whole thing or just for a part of it.

Friday, June 14th: DevOps Day Amsterdam will be happening! Be sure to meet our own Slava and Richard and let them tell you about how Engine Yard can make your lives easier. Articles of Interest

Mozilla’s John O’Dunn discusses how to use release engineering as a force-multiplier! David Padilla explains why hash lookups are so fast in Ruby on the Engine Yard blog.