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Announcing Database-less environments »

Created at: 16.05.2012 03:35, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Add-ons databases Engine Yard Cloud mongodb mysql PostgreSQL Technology

At Engine Yard, we believe that you should have the flexibility to set up your environments and manage your data stores as you see fit. This is something we take seriously as we continue to evolve Engine Yard Cloud and today, we are happy to announce database-less environments as an alpha release. If you need to utilize data offerings outside of our natively supported MySQL or PostgreSQL, then this feature will enable you to do so.

Enabling the feature

With database-less environments, it is no longer necessary to have a MySQL or PostgreSQL instance in every environment. Simply boot up a ‘No Database’ cluster with one of our Add-on database providers or roll your own using utility instances. Now it is easier and more affordable than ever to get started on Engine Yard.

You can enable this feature using the Early Access tools. Once you have the 'No db' feature enabled, you will be able to select the "No Database (Alpha)" option under Database Stack on the new environment form.

You can add as many application instances and utilities as you need, and you can stop paying for database masters that you don’t use.  For example, you can follow the Mongoid RailsCast (Episode 238) and create a simple blog using Mongoid using two application instances and three utility nodes.

Add-ons and DBaaS

You can also use the ‘No Database’ feature in combination with our Add-on Program (login required).  For example, you can have a simple application with just one instance and an external database. See the Database section of our Add-on Program for more information.

We hope you enjoy this feature and let us know what you think.

Notes

Removal of the database.yml file
Environments without databases will not have a database.yml file generated by Engine Yard Cloud. Enabling this feature means that you are either not using ActiveRecord or you have supplied your own database.yml file in your repository.

Infographic: A Mobile Storm in the Cloud »

Created at: 16.05.2012 01:47, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Engine Yard Cloud News Technology

Did you know that there are 3 billion more smartphones on earth than there are humans? Maybe that doesn’t come as much of a surprise to you. But what you might find more surprising is that the growth in smartphone adoption has actually contributed to Engine Yard’s success. That’s right: as smartphone adoption has grown, so has app consumption. As a result, businesses are now prioritizing mobile application development. By 2015, mobile application development projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of 4 to 1. Innovation in mobile is imperative, and there’s a need for tools that enable businesses to innovate quickly. Many cloud computing technologies--like Engine Yard's Platform as a Service--have enabled developers and businesses to focus on application innovation.

The below infographic includes even more interesting facts about innovations in mobile, cloud computing and PaaS. Check it out and let us know where you think these fields are headed next.

Copy and paste onto your blog:

<a href="http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/platform-as-a-service/"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-12384" src="http://www.engineyard.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/platform-as-a-service-v2.jpg" alt="Platform as a Service" width="930" height="5572" /></a><br/>Courtesy of: <a href="http://www.engineyard.com">Engine Yard</a>

Engine Yard Expands IaaS Offerings with HP Cloud Services »

Created at: 10.05.2012 15:01, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Engine Yard Cloud News Partners

We’re excited to announce that we’re expanding the infrastructure options available to our customers with support for HP Cloud Services. We empower developers by providing a rock-solid platform with choices of infrastructure and components that make their job of building great applications as easy as possible. Engine Yard is one of the first PaaS providers to add support for HP’s public cloud, which is based on their world-class hardware and software, using key elements of the HP Converged Infrastructure combined with OpenStack technology.

For the past six years, our customers have relied on the Engine Yard platform to enable them to innovate faster, with higher reliability and while maintaining control of their environment. We continue to invest deeply in our open source PaaS to provide value for our customers. We want to ensure developers can rapidly build and iterate their applications while using Engine Yard Cloud to provide the on-demand scalability and reliability they need as their businesses grow and succeed.

By combining our leading commercial-grade open PaaS with HP's public cloud infrastructure offerings, we’re providing development teams a powerful new solution to rapidly deploy both large and small applications in the cloud. Engine Yard has deep roots in open source, and we continue to champion open computing by adding new IaaS options like HP’s public cloud.

We’ll be announcing more details about availability. To get updates, click here.

Introducing Bloggy: A simple way to add a Jekyll blog to any Rails application »

Created at: 03.05.2012 20:22, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Engine Yard Cloud Open Source ruby Technology

One of the most popular tools our customers use to help drive traffic to their site is a company blog. Blogs that are informative and helpful will attract your target audience and bring attention to your website, and more importantly, your work.

Here at Engine Yard, we have found that some of our best sources of traffic are the blog posts written by our team that help educate customers on our product.

In particular, there is one blogging platform that has really started to catch on with the hacker community and especially those of us who love Ruby.

Authored by Tom Preston-Warner, Jekyll is an open-source blog-aware static site generator. Unlike Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous, Blogger and the like, it allows users to write posts in the editor of their choice with the markup they prefer and then commit the posts to git. I use Markdown to write my posts, but many others choose to write their posts in HTML because they were coming from WordPress and it felt more at home.

Currently, there are lots of posts out there detailing how to get started with Jekyll, how to run Jekyll as a Rack application, etc. What I want to talk about is just a little bit different from these posts.

Let's start with a simple concept. For SEO purposes it is better if your blog runs at http://mydomain.com/blog rather than http://blog.mydomain.com. We can go into detail here later but that's really for an entirely different post. Again there are numerous ways of accomplishing this task but I want to talk about doing it with Jekyll.

Finding a way to run your blogging platform within your existing application without many changes to the server configuration is a common cost cutting technique for bootstrapping startups, well-funded companies and even public corporations. One thing we know first hand is how time consuming and difficult that has proven to be for many of you over the years.

That’s why I wrote Bloggy. Simply put, Bloggy makes it easy to run a Jekyll blog right within your existing Rails application with no changes to your current configuration on Engine Yard.

Installing and configuring the Bloggy gem

Start by adding

gem ‘bloggy’

to your Gemfile in your repo, then just run

$ bundle

and it should be ready to go for you. Alternatively, you could install it by running

$ gem install bloggy

Once Bloggy is installed, all you need to do to get a working blog up and running is to use the provided Rails generator.

$ rails g jekyll:blog blog

BAM! This just generated your new blog and it’s live at http://yourdomain.com/blog

Go ahead start up your Rails server and check it out.

What Just Happened?

The static HTML generated by Jekyll (the magic behind Bloggy) goes to your public/blog directory, but the rest of the files live at config/jekyll and this is where you will create new posts, change the default look and feel of your blog and make any configuration changes you desire as you get acquainted with Jekyll.

If you’ve never used Jekyll before, you need to familiarize yourself with a few things.

1. Bloggy Generates static HTML from the markdown files that live inside the config/jekyll/_posts directory, so this is where you will create new posts (more on how to make the generation happen later).

2. The default layout of the Bloggy generated blog is found at config/jekyll/_layouts/default.html. This file is plain ole HTML and can be edited to your liking just like you would edit any other HTML file.

3. The config/jekyll/css directory contains, wait for it … your CSS files!

Configuration and new posts

If however, you are familiar with Jekyll already you will be delighted to know you can still choose from all of the options you enjoyed with the Jekyll gem previously.

The same familiar config elements of Jekyll can be accessed using the _config.yml file that is now neatly tucked away in the config/jekyll directory of your Rails application.

Now that your new blog is installed and serving pages at http://yourdomain.com/blog you probably are thinking:

“Zach this is great, but how do I write a new blog post? How do I get rid of the test post you provided me?”

Those are great questions. I’ll start with the simplest:

1. To get rid of the generated test post, simply delete the file from your config/jekyll/_posts.

$ rm appname/config/jekyll/_posts/2012-04-25-a-test-post.markdown

2. And to create a new post it’s not much more complicated. Just run the Rake task provided with Bloggy, which will automatically generate a post and open it so you can start writing right away.

$ rake np your_post_title

This will by default open up your new post in TextMate. If you don’t have TextMate or prefer another editor you can just change mate on this line at the end of the new_post.rake file located in your appname/lib/tasks directory.

‘mate #{path}’  - for example if you wanted to use vim you should use  ‘vim #{path}’

Now, if you’re looking carefully at the created post you will notice that your post was named with a slightly different scheme than just your title. This is critical to Jekyll being able to recognize and generate your posts into static HTML files that your application can serve, so please do not change this. For example if you ran that task today your post would look something like this:

2012-05-03-your-post-title.markdown

Feel free to change the date just make sure you leave it in the correct format, but keep in mind that YAML is required at the top of your post (including the dashes) for Jekyll to generate Metadata when generating the final HTML that you will see your posts rendered in. So the top of your file should always look something like this:

---
layout: post
published: false
title: A Test Post
---

The Rake task provided takes care of that for you but be sure to edit your title and add any other metadata you want included. Other than that, just be sure to change published: false to published: true so Jekyll knows your post is ready to go live on your blog for the world to see. Once you have written, edited and reviewed to your liking all you need to do is another Rake task.

$ rake generate

From there Jekyll will automatically regenerate your posts as static HTML files stored in the public/blog directory and these files will be served from http://yourdomain.com/blog with no additonal Nginx configuration.

You will have to hit CTRL + C on your keyboard after the files are generated to stop the Jekyll server as it wants to stay on and continually look for new posts to generate.

Now from your application directory you can just run a few commands to make sure you have added your changes to git and pushed them to your repo.

$ git add .

$ git commit -m ‘your commit message’

$ git push

Then deploy to Engine Yard using our awesome CLI tool! by running

$ ey deploy

That’s it! It’s really that simple.

So go check out Bloggy and be sure to fork and contribute if you want to see something added to Bloggy that would help you even more!

I have a sample application for you guys to play around with at our Engine Yard GitHub account.

Alternatively, you can just checking it out in action by clicking here.

Happy blogging!

Visual Enhancements to the Dashboard »

Created at: 07.02.2012 03:43, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Customers Engine Yard Cloud Technology

These layout upgrades make the Dashboard easier to use and visually clearer, but they don’t affect functionality or your established workflows. Most importantly, the new column dimensions will help us deliver other features and user experience enhancements over time.

1. Tools are up top.

“Tools” are now a part of the header system, in a drop down menu to the upper-right. The “Dashboard” link does the same thing as the blue house icon that appears on almost every page.

2. Fix it quicker.

It’s now easier to file a ticket or visit our documentation. If you are the owner of an account, you will also see a link where you can manage your support level.

3. I’ll take my messages on the side.

Alert and notification messages are now on the right side of the page, making them more readable and preventing them from pushing everything else far down the page when they stack up.

Next up.

Our next steps include improving the messages and alerts to make them context sensitive and to let you filter them. We’ll also be rolling out some cool navigation updates. Sit tight and we’ll post here again soon.

Holla at us!

We would love to hear your feedback regarding these changes! Please email ux@engineyard.com with your comments or suggestions.