February 14, 2014: This Week at Engine Yard

Happy Valentine’s Day from Engine Yard!

Have you checked out the recently relaunched engineyard.com? You should, the site re-design is gorgeous! Way to go, web team!

 –Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

Postgres 9.3: now in GA!

Postgres 9.3 has been moved from early access into general availability this week, and it is now our default relational database for new environments! Check out our docs to read all about it.

This new version of PostgreSQL has many new features including:

• Writeable foreign data wrappers (FDWs)
• Faster failover
• Materialized views
• Parallel pg_dump to speed backups of large databases

If you have any questions on how to upgrade, or want our professional services team to do an upgrade for you, open a ticket and ask!

ext4 availability!

Now in early access: ext4. The ext4 or fourth extended filesystem is a journaling filesystem for Linux, developed as the successor to ext3. Enabling the ext4 Linux File System Early Access feature provides you the option of having the /data and /db volumes formatted with ext4 instead of ext3.

Check out the release notes for our regularly scheduled stack updates and associated docs!

Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

Tuesday, February 18th - Friday, February 21st: DeveloperWeek in San Francisco starts next week. Your friendly neighborhood PANDA, Edward Chiu will be giving a short talk on Engine Yard and cloud development. Stop by and give him a high five!

Friday, February 21st - Our PHP crew of Slava, Davey, Noelle, and Product Manager Josh Pederson are London bound for PHPUK! We’re super excited for this years edition, as we’ll have a whole room dedicated to talking about all things Cloud. We’ll also have free coffee, t-shirts, and other swag, so you won’t want to miss it.

Articles of Interest

Anil Dash reports back after a year in which he only re-tweeted womens’ tweets (and Prince, occasionally).

The Olympics demonstrate that live demos are dangerous, even when you’ve practiced flawlessly for hours (or months) ahead of time.