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Engine Yard’s Plans for Ruby 1.8.6 »

Created at: 20.09.2011 21:05, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: News Open Source Technology Ruby 1.8.6

Back in May of 2009, Engine Yard’s Kirk Haines took over legacy maintenance duties for Ruby 1.8.6. Since then, the core Ruby team led by Kirk has released patches, security updates, and performance tweaks for Ruby 1.8.6 benefiting Engine Yard’s customers who wished to remain on Ruby 1.8.6. However, as is often the case, all good things must come to an end. 

At RubyKaigi this year, Kirk announced that he along with the rest of the core Ruby team would no longer be supporting Ruby 1.8.6. This means that customers using Ruby 1.8.6 will no longer benefit from the latest security patches and performance improvements being developed. While your applications will continue to operate, we believe our customers would benefit most from using the latest technology components.

No immediate action is currently required but now would be a good time to start evaluating a migration to 1.8.7 or 1.9.2 for everyone currently running 1.8.6. Engine Yard will be contacting customers who currently have environments running 1.8.6 in order to discuss options and timelines. At a high level, the three different options for customers are:

• Perform the migration yourself by following these high level steps
• Contact Engine Yard Professional Services in order to have the migration performed on your behalf.
• Take no action, acknowledging that no new MRI patches or updates will be available to your environment.

When considering your migration strategy, it will also be important to keep in mind that Ruby 1.8.7 will be downgraded to support-only maintenance in the summer of 2012 and will reach end-of-life during the following summer in 2013. We recently set Ruby 1.9.2 as our default run-time and strongly recommend you consider it for your migration.

Engine Yard Portland is open for business! »

Created at: 16.09.2011 19:57, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: News Engine Yard Portland

Earlier this month we moved into our new office space at 1009 SW Yamhill Street in Portland. After a couple weeks of getting everything set up, we're ready for guests!  If you're in the area, get in touch and come by for a drink, or to join us for lunch at the food carts.

New additions to the Portland ranks

Since first announcing the Portland office opening, we've also welcomed some new folks to the Portland crew. We're excited to welcome to James Rucker and Jim Lindley!

[caption id="attachment_10549" align="aligncenter" width="610" caption="James Rucker (left) and Jim Lindley (right)"][/caption]

James comes to us by way of Rentrak, where he hacked on analytics web apps for large datasets. He's a great addition to our cloud platform dev team. When he's not behind his laptop, you'll likely find him brewing beer or hiking the Gorge. We're looking forward to pitting his home-brewing talents against those of Jacob Burkhart, our resident brewmaster in San Francisco.

Jim is our newest engineer and is a recent refuge from the snowy wastes of the Northeast. Jim previously worked on automated media analysis, large scale video storage and processing, and most recently worked as a senior developer for the premier national college application service (yes, the same one many of you used once upon a time). Jim will put his years of Ruby and Javascript experience to good use as a part of our platform team -- working on tasks as diverse as fixing annoying Internet Explorer bugs, to increasing availability and reliability for server setups.

Come work from our couch

Now that we're settled into our space with wifi, desks, and comfy couches (modeled by Jim above), we're better set up to host. Last Thursday we christened the office with our first guests: Tim and Peter from Gemstone, and Nic and Jon from New Relic. Thanks for helping break in the couches, guys! If you didn't have a chance to meet Koichi Sasada at the pdx.rb meetup earlier this month, he'll be co-working from the office for another two weeks before he heads to RubyConf, and then home to Japan.

We're delighted to be settled in our new Portland digs. Thanks for making us feel so welcome. Don't be shy, come by and say hello! And, if you're interested in joining the team, we're hiring.

Introducing the Engine Yard Data Team »

Created at: 02.09.2011 21:08, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: News Technology engine yard data team mongodb mysql PostgreSQL

The Engine Yard Data Team’s mission is to formulate and iterate the Engine Yard data storage strategy, to help customers understand and choose their data solutions, to support OSS projects that match our vision, and to strengthen our leadership in the Ruby on Rails community. Our team is composed of Ines Sombra and our amazing DBAs: Erik Jones, Tyler Poland, and John Dalton.

We want to ensure that when you choose Engine Yard as your platform provider you have access to interesting data stores, features, tools, and information to build robust and scalable solutions.

Our Goals

• Simplify and hide the complexities associated with data repositories.
• Choose the best-in-class technologies and publish our own best practices.
• Work closely with our customers and developers to understand their use cases and usage patterns.
• Routinely assess how closely our data products and support match our customers needs.
• Ensure Engine Yard’s data repositories are up-to-date with the rapidly evolving storage technology landscape.
• Establish partnerships with key data providers to offer our customers additional services.
• Design and support multi-site disaster recovery and business continuity plans for each type of data store by working with our customers to understand their scaling needs.

What we are currently working on

Upgrading our MySQL implementation

The team is currently working at a rapid pace to upgrade MySQL to version 5.1 and 5.5. We’ll also be improving MySQL replication, monitoring, backup, and fail-over tools.

Expanding the DB stack

We are working hard on expanding our stack to offer interesting NoSQL data stores, caches, and full-text search solutions. The products we are working on at the moment are:

PostgreSQL 9 PostgreSQL 9 is now in Alpha (click here for access). We are currently working towards a public Beta for all our customers to try. Postgres extensions will be available as part of the Beta release.

MongoDB We are working towards an Alpha release of MongoDB. We have been collaborating with customers that are interested in this technology to further develop our tools and finalize our supported architecture. We have established critical partnerships with hosted MongoDB providers (MongoHQ and MongoLab), and are working with 10gen to provide additional support options for our customers.

Redefining environments and data stores relationships

We are changing the way environments interact with data stores to provide greater flexibility and configuration options. We aim to support zero to multiple data stores in the same environment to facilitate the creation of polyglot systems in our platform.

Improving our data documentation

We are collaborating with the PANDAs and our Documentation team to restructure and augment our data documentation. Watch for changes in docs.engineyard.com and let us know if we are not covering something that you are interested in.

We want to hear from you!

We are actively evaluating customer requested features and we will keep you informed as our work grows from ideas to projects. Our intention is to create a strong collaborative process with our customer community, so let us know what you need.

We’d love to hear your feedback! Please drop us a note at: docs.engineyard.com/data-feedback.html

Want to work with us?

Are you passionate about data? We are hiring!

Help Send Engine Yard to Austin for SXSW »

Created at: 27.08.2011 01:02, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: News sxsw

[caption id="attachment_10334" align="alignright" width="250" caption="Photo from flickr user alexdecarvalho"][/caption]

If you’ve been to SXSW before, we don’t need to tell you that this isn’t your father’s conference. It’s quite impossible to express the experience, energy and excitement people get from this exciting event.  A multimedia trifecta of music, technology and film, the independent spirit of SXSW is perhaps most directly influenced by the spirit of Austin itself.  The city’s provocative “keep Austin weird” slogan is proudly displayed on bumper stickers and  t-shirts and Austin’s 60,000+ college students gives the city a youthful and progressive vibe.

In recent years, popular social media sites such as Twitter and Foursquare have gained early traction and buzz during SXSW, making it the “must attend” event in the social media and web space.  In line with its social media roots, SXSW Interactive crowd-sources their agenda by listening to the voice of the community.  So if you’d like to see us included  in the conversation at SXSW next year, we need your help!

We are thrilled that the following Engine Yard sessions are currently under consideration:

• Why You Should Contribute to Online Communities by Dr Nic Williams
• Going Beyond Gamification: New York Public Library by Tom Mornini and Nathan Verrill
• Building Mobile Apps: Prepare for explosive growth by Tammer Saleh
• Rise of the Indie Web featuring Shane Becker and a panel that includes Google, Flat Frog Design, and Tantek.com

Sound interesting? If so, please vote for us!  Simply create a free account at panelpicker.sxsw.com and click the “thumbs up” icon next to the proposals you like.

While you’re here, what aspects of these topics interest you the most?

Ruby, the Cloud, and Open Standards »

Created at: 25.05.2011 20:25, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: News openstack

At Engine Yard we have always adhered to a strong belief that open, community-based innovation and standards are the future of computing. We created our platform around Ruby and Rails not just because of their substantial technical merits and open source roots, but also because of the vibrant community surrounding them. Our entire stack is open source, and where standards exist we adopt them. We are laser-focused on providing the best Platform-as-a-Service out there, runnable on multiple infrastructures and supporting the options our customers demand. In the early days of an emerging technology, attempts to define standards will simply be ignored at best or engender cynicism at worst. But there comes a time where fundamentals are sufficiently understood and optimized that it’s in the industry’s best interests to agree on a standard. Players can then compete on implementations of the standard or move on to compete in newer areas. We’re seeing this begin to happen in the foundational layers of cloud technology, and with the OpenStack standard in particular. OpenStack is a set of three open source projects/APIs for managing cloud infrastructure: OpenStack Compute, OpenStack Object Storage, and OpenStack Image Service. The Compute API includes the primitives for orchestrating cloud infrastructure, including spinning up and down virtual machines as well as networking, authentication, live migration, etc. It is hypervisor-agnostic, supporting VMware ESX, Xen, Hyper-V, and others. Object Storage is an API for storing data objects in a reliable way, and the Image Service is a layer above Object Storage (or other storage) for managing virtual machine images. All of these projects address important infrastructure-level capabilities that Engine Yard leverages in providing our users with automation and control. We see standardization at the infrastructure level as a great thing for customers and the industry. We are excited about the community momentum building around the OpenStack standard, exemplified by today’s announcement by Citrix, and we look forward to enabling the Engine Yard platform in the future to run on OpenStack-based infrastructures. Keep your seatbelt on for a continuing fast ride with cloud, but take comfort in knowing that the suspension is getting stronger by the day!