Just the other day Krish posted about the new partnership between Apigee and Heroku the Ruby PaaS player. Hot on the heels of that announcement comes news that EngineYard are partnering with TerreMark to provide a more enterprise class Ruby PaaS.
First some background – EngineYard already has AppCloud, a mid level Ruby PaaS offering that is primarily aimed at business units within an organization who want to do a bit of mid range application development. They’re announcing today xCloud, an offering aimed more for the enterprise level needs.
The key differences between xCloud and AppCloud are:
- xCloud is designed for more complex needs with higher IO requirements
- xCloud is both PCI and SAS70 compliant – a core requirement for many enterprise level uses
- xCloud is backed by SLAs – similarly a must-have for enterprise
- xCloud allows developers to deploy on custom configured hardware
I spoke with EngineYard who were quick to articulate the benefits of using an open development platform – in a comment clearly aimed at the likes of force.com and Azure, they reminded me of the benefits of using products built on open source technology thus removing any vendor lock-in and allowing for easy migration.
Being a Rail platform, EngineYard allows developers to build in languages they’re used to, and that have a large community following, rather than more proprietary offerings such as APEX or .NET that force.com and Azure support. In fact Gartner estimates that Ruby will reach 4 million programmers by 2013. EngineYard is a strong contributor to the Rails community including:
- Providing eight full time contributors to Ruby/Jruby and Rails
- Contributing to 40+ open source projects
- Supporting 33 Ruby user groups on 4 continents
PaaS is hot, open-source is cool. Put the two together with enterprise level service and robustness and you have a good combination.
This is interesting as cloud computing makes its way into enterprise. Growing faith in these models will lead to its becoming more common for enterprises to use it.