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Engine Yard (previous CloudAve coverage) finally pushed themselves into the freemium game today with the announcement that new users can try their AppCloud for 500 hours without even giving their credit card. This will let more developers to try out their PaaS offering before committing to them financially. After Heroku (see previous CloudAve coverage) got acquired by Salesforce.com, Engine Yard became the darling for developers looking to deploy their apps on a Ruby cloud. This announcement has a potential to lure more developers towards their platform. For reasons which I cannot share publicly, I think this is a strategic move by Engine Yard to put themselves ahead of any other competition.
Engine Yard has established themselves as one of the trusted PaaS players with offerings targeting both the Startups (Engine Yard AppCloud) and Enterprises (Engine Yard Enterprise offering). With more than 1900 customers on their platform, their PaaS solution offers worry free deployment, management and scaling along with professional support from Rails experts. From their partnership with Appcelerator for mobile solutions to their partnership with Terremark for offering private cloud solutions to their smart tool to migrate Heroku users to their platform, Engine Yard has made all the right moves in the industry. With this announcement, they are trying to tighten their grip in this space
New users can now try their Rails/Sinatra/Rack applications on AppCloud for 500 hours. The users get a High-CPU instance with 2 virtual cores and 1.7GB of memory and once they reach the time limit or need more horsepower, they can easily upgrade to paid plans. This also opens up an opportunity for their Development Partners and Rails Consultants to showcase the power of running Ruby on Rails apps on the cloud.
It will be interesting to see how Engine Yard evolves as the PaaS space gets crowded with more companies entering the market with their own offerings. With the buzz around Heroku dying fast after the Salesforce.com acquisition, we can expect some new entrants into the Ruby platform space. With enterprises’ newfound interest in Ruby on Rails development, this space is definitely going to heat up. Engine Yard is already positioned well for the enterprise market but it will be interesting to see how they are going to fend off some competition that will come up in the future.
Related articles
- Engine Yard AppCloud: free 500 hours for new customers (engineyard.com)
- Engine Yard Releases Heroku Migration Tool (readwriteweb.com)
- Engine Yard: The Ruby on Rails Company Salesforce Didn’t Buy (xconomy.com)
- Enabling the Mobile Cloud: Appcelerator Partners with Engine Yard (readwriteweb.com)
- Questions to answer when determining your platform as a service provider (PaaS) (servicexen.wordpress.com)
