Engine Yard Now Supports Magento on AWS

As one of the first players in the Platform as a Service (PaaS) market, Engine Yard has deployed close to 1 billion application hours on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Yes, 1 billion. Household names such as Groupon, Hotel Tonight, and Bleacher Report have grown their businesses on us.

So it’s safe to say that we know the cloud pretty well – especially the AWS cloud, though we’re also handy with Verizon Terremark and Microsoft Azure. As a management layer on top of AWS, the Engine Yard platform has rich automation and tooling around provisioning, scaling, and maintenance of cloud environments. And our DevOps Support Team backs this up with in-depth knowledge and understanding of our customers’ applications.

This coupling of battle-tested platform automation with deep DevOps support expertise is unique, very unique. I would argue that no other cloud platform comes close to doing this, but we’ll save that discussion for another time. This combination speaks strongly to all application types, regardless of vertical, that want and need the benefits of cloud-flexibility.

Enter Magento.

Magento sites, like all eCommerce applications, strive for optimal speed and performance, 100% uptime, zero data loss, and high quality support. Solving these needs is the bread and butter of Engine Yard and exactly what we’ve been doing for those 1 billion hours in the cloud. So, it made perfect sense for us to apply this deep experience and knowledge to Magento when we launched our formal support for this leading eCommerce framework in May.

Here is what we’re doing for Magento in the cloud.

First, we’ve taken platform automation to a whole new level with our Magento Community Blueprints. These are pre-packaged cloud architectures designed to best run and scale Magento Community in the cloud. In addition to an optimized PHP FPM app server and MySQL, our blueprints come pre-wired with components like Redis, Memcached, and HA Proxy. In 3 clicks you can provision a fully load balanced cloud environment enabled with shared session handling and caching. With 1 more click you can deploy Magento from your Git repo to the environment and be up and running in minutes. Pretty cool.

Next, we’ve ramped our DevOps Support Team on scaling and maintaining Magento sites on a global scale. This means that those folks who cultivated Groupon and Hotel Tonight in the cloud are now doing the same for Magento Community and Enterprise. From start to finish they can migrate, optimize, and support any size Magento site or help architect a new application from scratch. Their goal is to help you take full advantage of cloud flexibility on AWS to produce a performant and highly available site that will maximize your business online.

To back it all up, we’ve got folks dedicated to benchmarking both Magento Community and Enterprise on the Engine Yard platform. This area of our engineering team spends their days testing and tuning to squeeze every ounce of performance out of our core PHP stack and blueprint components (Redis, Memcached, etc.). We continually leverage benchmark results to guide stack optimizations and develop new automation features within our platform (yes, more automation!).

And there is much, much more to come.

This summer we’ll be releasing deeper support for horizontal scaling of Magento Community through preservation (and extension) of configuration settings in local.xml. As you add or remove instances from your environment the Engine Yard platform will automatically update local.xml with the appropriate changes so your site never skips a beat when scaling up or down. Your DevOps guys will love it. We’ll also be releasing Magento Enterprise Blueprints and a guided process for selecting the right blueprint architecture for your site based on expected traffic load and catalog size.

Within our stack we’ll be supporting formal instance types for Varnish and Solr and allowing for 1-click provisioning of these components. Tied to this will be the exposure of ‘knobs and dials’ in the Engine Yard UI to manage common configuration settings of all tiers (load balance, app, database, cache, etc.) drastically reducing the amount of hands-on coding to optimize your Magento deployment. The more we can offload your work onto our platform the better.

Finally, we’re thrilled to help move Magento to AWS and the cloud.

For the entire Engine Yard team it is incredibly gratifying to leverage years of experience deploying cloud applications of all shapes and sizes around the world into a highly focused and effective product for Magento. We’ve really only just scratched the surface and look forward to playing a key role in this amazing transition to the cloud.

You can learn more about Magento on Engine Yard by going here or if you’re interested in chatting with our team you can schedule a consultation.