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MySQL 5.5 and 5.1 Support in Alpha »

Created at: 22.09.2011 22:59, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Product Engine Yard Beta Program engine yard data team mysql Percona

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PostgreSQL 9 Support in Alpha »

Created at: 12.07.2011 01:16, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: cloud Product Technology appcloud Engine Yard Beta Program PostgreSQL

We are happy to announce that we have made PostgreSQL 9 available in Alpha to AppCloud customers who want to give it a try. Customers looking for additional database choices who are interested in the features offered by PostgreSQL 9 (current version is 9.0.4) should enroll in the alpha program. Also, we are currently working towards our Beta release, which will be available to all customers, and we want to include as much of your feedback as possible to make this a great feature! In addition to taking advantage of the stability, robustness, and feature set offered by PostgreSQL 9, customers using Rails 3.1 can take advantage of significant speed gains with PostgreSQL over MySQL. At RailsConf 2011, Aaron Patterson talked about the use of cached prepared statements in Rails 3.1, which provide a significant boost for PostgreSQL. If you would like to try PostgreSQL in Alpha:

• Review the documentation, noting the current limitations for this Alpha release. These are important to be aware of before you request Alpha access.
• Request access.

Once you’ve been granted Alpha access, refer back to the documentation for instructions on how to set up PostgreSQL 9 on your environment. Have some fun with it and let us know what you think! You can provide feedback by creating a discussion on the ey-beta-talk mailing list.

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JRuby on AppCloud Available Through Beta Program »

Created at: 25.05.2011 04:39, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: cloud Product Technology Engine Yard Beta Program jruby jruby on appcloud trinidad

We’re overjoyed to announce that customers can now sign up to use JRuby with Engine Yard AppCloud through our beta program. Engine Yard has been a strong supporter of the JRuby project and we’re thrilled that we can now begin offering JRuby support to our customers. There are two camps of customers demanding JRuby:

• Applications that desire to incorporate Java libraries
• Developers wanting features that MRI cannot provide – real threads, a selection of modern garbage collectors, in-process caching, and full utilization of available memory, as starters.

A key enabler for JRuby support is Trinidad. Trinidad allows you to run rails or rack compatible applications within an embedded Apache Tomcat, and it is the creation of Engine Yard’s David Calavera. Switching to Trinidad and JRuby in local development is very easy:

1. Add to your Gemfile:

     platforms :jruby do
       gem 'activerecord-jdbc-adapter'
       gem 'jruby-openssl'
       gem 'jdbc-mysql', :require => false
       gem 'trinidad'
     end
     platforms :ruby do
       gem 'mysql2'
     end

2. Install and switch to JRuby:

   $ rvm install jruby
   $ rvm jruby
   $ bundle

3. Launch your Ruby application with Trinidad (it auto-detects what sort of Ruby web application you have):

   $ trinidad

4. Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser and wait for the Tomcat application server to boot up, then you are good to go.
5. Commit the Gemfile & Gemfile.lock changes (possibly to a branch)
6. Deploy to staging environment on AppCloud setup with JRuby. There are some additional instructions and limitations in the Trinidad/JRuby documentation.

It is strongly suggested you trial your application against JRuby locally first, then in an AppCloud staging environment, and then upgrade your production environment. As a feature under the beta program, we will endeavor to provide all JRuby users with feedback and support via the ey-beta-talk mailing list. It is our intent to stabilize our JRuby integration as soon as possible and move it into General Availability (and thus fully supported under Engine Yard Support programs).

Full House of Rubies

Personally, I’m more than overjoyed. With JRuby now available on AppCloud, Engine Yard is the first Ruby platform to make available all stable, production-ready Ruby implementations; most notably JRuby and Rubinius.

OSS Grant for David Calavera

I would also like to announce that earlier this year Engine Yard offered David Calavera an Engine Yard OSS Grant towards the Trinidad project. This has allowed David to travel to Baltimore last week to speak at RailsConf. We’re excited to continue to help David spread the word about Trinidad – it is our favorite “JRuby in a Box” solution!

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Rubinius on AppCloud »

Created at: 22.03.2011 20:06, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Product appcloud Engine Yard Beta Program rubinius

I'm extremely proud to announce that Rubinius on Engine Yard AppCloud is now available in Alpha. This has been the culmination of years of work by countless people inside and outside of Engine Yard. Way back in 2007, when I first started at Engine Yard we began talking about this day. A lot has changed in the intervening years with both Engine Yard and Rubinius but nothing has changed the focus on building Rubinius as a first class Ruby environment that is easy to use. Engine Yard has seen significant movement into the cloud/platform services realm and Rubinius has meanwhile begun to push the boundaries of Ruby performance. We've been building software and services to get us to this exact point in time and I couldn't be more excited. Rubinius now has all kinds of tools for making a developer's life easier, from builtin profilers to external monitoring.

Enabling Access to Rubinius on AppCloud

Now for the nitty gritty. We're going to be making Rubinius available in Alpha (as a part of our Beta Program). This means it will only be available to users that specifically request it. To request to have Rubinius available as one of your Rubies, fill in this form for each AppCloud account email. We'll flip a bit in your account and you'll have Rubinius as an option when configuring your instances.

Support for Rubinius on AppCloud

As a trial program, we want Alpha users to report issues back to us as quickly as possible. This will help us get them fixed and help smooth out the rough edges before Rubinius is moved into Beta, and then finally made available to all our users. Please initiate Support requests and feedback via the EY Beta discussion group.

Thank You

On a final personal note, I'd like to thank all the people who have contributed to Rubinius over the past many years. Your help, no matter the size, has helped us get to this point. I can't wait to see where users take Rubinius on AppCloud!

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Want to join the Engine Yard Beta Program? »

Created at: 22.10.2010 19:56, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: cloud News Engine Yard Beta Program

Deploying, automating and managing production Rails applications is always changing – new stack elements, new features in our cloud platforms, and new tools to help development. We think many of these features will be interesting to you whilst they are still in development. If you do too then welcome to the Engine Yard Beta Program!

In advance, we want to thank you for your participation. Your feedback is very much appreciated. It helps us ensure we continue to deliver top quality features to you and all of our customers.

There are three parts to our Beta Program:

• Beta Announcements
• Alpha Features and Improvements
• Beta Features and Improvements

Beta Announcements

We care about you and your production Rails applications. If you are interested in the latest features and stack improvements we’d prefer that you self-selected yourself, rather than us notifying all 1500+ hard-working customer teams. So, we created a Beta Announcements mailing list to quietly inform you about new features that you can trial, if you or your team are interested.

It is self-selecting -- join if you are interested. Of course, I personally highly recommend it for all customers to give you visibility into what features are coming down the Engine Yard pipeline. Something wonderful and empowering might be coming soon!

The Beta Announcements list is only available to Engine Yard customers. To join the Beta Announcements list:

• Go to the Documentation site
• Login (via the top right “Login” link)
• Follow the new Beta link at the top of the page
• Or go to the Beta Announcements section
• Fill in your email and click Subscribe!

Alpha Features

“Alpha” features are initially implemented with the minimum required functionality, are still in development, and may use Open Source technology that itself is not qualified as “production-ready”. We think some customers and partners may want it sooner than later and are happy to help us iron out any missing bits.

For this reason we created a way for a small handful of our customers to help us, and for us to help you, on each new feature. We call these Alpha Features.

For Open Source stack items, the underlying technology might be rock solid but it may be classed as an “Alpha Feature” because it is relatively new to the Engine Yard Technology Stack. Once a few customers have trialled it and given it the green light, and we’ve finished our documentation and Support training, we’ll move it to Beta and beyond.

Alpha features are currently available to test on an as requested basis for customers who are willing to help us move these important features forward from Alpha to Beta.

Alpha features carry a warning: do not request support via the normal support channels.

The current list of Alpha features is top secret, but includes [redacted], [redacted], and [redacted]. [Ed: @drnic seriously, stop it.]

Engine Yard customers, jump into the Beta site (see instructions above) to see the current list and request access if they excite you.

Beta Features

When we feel a feature is close to being ready for production applications, has been used and verified by a handful of customers, has a set of documentation and once our Support team is trained on the feature/technology, we will then promote the feature from “Alpha” to “Beta”.

Beta features are visible and usable by all Engine Yard customers but carry a warning: do not request support via the normal support channels. There is a mailing list for each Beta feature to discuss bugs, issues and feature requests with Engine Yard staff and other Engine Yard customers.

The current list of Beta features isn’t top secret at all. It has been omitted from this post for the sake of brevity, replaced instead with this long sentence.

Support Details

Access to the Beta program does not require an Engine Yard Support agreement. If you help us to help you with new features, we are extremely grateful.

Each new feature or improvement has its own support channel, rather than the standard support channels like the ticketing system, community site, IRC, etc.

Summary

The Beta page will now be the canonical page describing which features are available for trial, how to access them, how to request support and report bugs. It is very exciting to continually improve the transparency of operations at Engine Yard, and make it easier and more engaging to talk with our customers.

Again, many thanks in advance for your assistance. We're grateful you're willing to help us deliver a wonderful Engine Yard service and experience to make your web applications successful.

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