May 17, 2013: This Week at Engine Yard

I spent this week with the team of engineers who made Riak on Engine Yard Cloud possible, attending RICON East: all Distributed Systems, all the time. Later in the week we took advantage of being in New York City to visit local customers and discuss the various features we’re working on and field any technical, product, and data questions.

Both our engineering and product teams love incorporating customer feedback into our direction. Speaking of which – if you’re in San Francisco, I’m organizing customer UX feedback sessions! Hit me up :)

–Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

PHP is now GA on Engine Yard Cloud! Per Product Manager Noah Slater: “PHP has been an important part of Engine Yard’s growing family since the acquisition of Orchestra in 2011. And now, PHP on Engine Yard Cloud represents the culmination of our efforts to deliver the industry’s best Platform as a Service for PHP developers. The result of this work is a unified service offering for PHP, Node.js, and Ruby applications.” Read all about the GA launch announced by Davey Shafik at php[tek] in Chicago this week!

Data Data Data

Riak and Clusters are live! See our blog post for more info - https://blog.engineyard.com/2013/riak-is-ga-engine-yard

A cluster is a new way to organize and manage instances that share a specific function. Clusters take much of the functionality that was once placed at the environment level, and moves it down to the cluster level. One environment can have many clusters, and each cluster can run different cookbooks and be in different regions.

We drove the cluster model hand in hand with our productization of Riak on Cloud because the distributed model of Riak paired perfectly with where we wanted to drive the future of our platform. We can now take this underlying work and begin to re-productize other offerings to take advantage of its flexibility in many ways.

Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

Tuesday May 20th: Engine Yard Dublin hosts the PHP meetup where Eugene Kenny, Adverts.ie discusses his “Developer Toolbox”, and then Matthew Weier O’Phinney of Zend Framework & Nate Abele of Lithium go head to head on the subject of Frameworks.

Wednesday May 21st: Engine Yard’s San Francisco HQ will be hosting the monthly Riak meetup! Lead data engineer and fan favorite Ines Sombra will be presenting about Riak on Engine Yard Cloud, followed by Basho’s Mark Phillips discussing Riak CS.

Wednesday May 21st: Our PDX office will be hosting Coder Dojo for students K-12 to learn about software! Grab a ticket and bring your parents for some software fun.

Thursday May 22nd: Engine Yard Dublin plays host to Open Data Ireland, “Give us our health data!”

Friday May 23rd: In which I talk about myself in the 3rd person? Tasha Drew will be speaking at Cloud East in Cambridge, UK, about deployments in the cloud, including various strategies we at Engine Yard see for environments of different sizes – and concluding with sharing our own deployment strategy.

Articles of Interest

Lightweight screenshot and annotation tool http://glui.me/ has gained some fans in our office! Engine Yard friend Daragh Curran, Head of Product Engineering, Intercom shared an awesome blog here. “Shipping brings life to your team, to your product, and to your customers. Shipping is your company’s heartbeat.”