May 24, 2013: This Week at Engine Yard

Just finished speaking at the delightful Cloud East Conference in Cambridge, England! Glad to say that my velociraptor slide went over well. Bridget and I have been visiting customers in London and Brighton, and are going to Berlin on Monday for DevOps Day! If you’re there, be sure to say hi! The intrepid Kevin Holler and inimitable Slava will also be in attendance.

–Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

We have a couple fun and useful items in our early access phase! If you go to the dashboard, and from the menu select Tools » Early Access, you will now find Application Takeover Preference and Ruby 2.0.

Application takeover preference allows you to easily set how you want our automated application takeovers to occur, in case our default behavior isn’t working for you. Once enabled, you can go to “Edit Environment,” and you will see a new dropdown:

So if you’ve been having any trouble with your specific customizations not booting properly when we are automatically handling application takeover, you can select to instead boot from a new volume; have a takeover occur, but without booting a new application slave to replace the one being promoted; or disable the feature entirely.

As with all our early access features, we would be delighted if you shared your thoughts on these as you use them. Need something additional? Anything not working correctly? Documentation confusing? Love it and want to let us know? Tell us any and everything at our Early Access Forum!

And, also in early access, we have big news for our Rubyists: Engine Yard now has Ruby 2.0! We’ve had Rails 4 for a while now if you want to try them together. The full featured Ruby 2.0 integration in the UI, etc., is still getting some work done, so for now the installation instructions have some unique steps (i.e. not through the dashboard). See our docs for all the details!

Data Data Data As we continue to enhance our new cluster model, we are in the planning phase for upcoming new data stacks! One of our top priorities is our mySQL database stack and how to make it more awesome as it takes advantage of the new data model. We are in the early stages of re-productizing it, so if you have any wish lists of things you’d like to see from our mySQL offering, please let us know in the feature request forums!

Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

Monday May 27th - Tuesday May 28th: Engine Yard will be participating as a sponsor of DevOps Day Berlin! Kevin Holler will be delivering a 5 minute talk about Engine Yard Cloud, and Tasha Drew and Bridget Gleason will cheer him on from the audience.

Wednesday May 29th: Our Portland office will be hosting the weekly Coder Dojo PDX!

Thursday May 30th: Engine Yard’s Dublin office is host to another addition of Node.js Dublin, featuring Dominykas Blyžė, Daniel McKay, and Isaac Schlueter. Pizza and beer will be served!

Saturday June 1st: Engine Yard Dublin will host an IXDA Prototyping workshop. In this workshop you will learn how to create wireframes and interactive prototypes using the popular tool Axure RP.

Articles of Interest

Cern launched a public appeal to find the world’s oldest webpage, and this is what they found. What would the Games of Thrones characters look like if the show was staged in the 1990’s? Now we know.