Engine Yard will extend on Thursday its services for cloud-based services for Ruby on Rails applications, giving users the option to deploy on Terremark infrastructure.
The company's xCloud service enables deployments of Rails applications onto Teramark. Engine Yard already has offered Rails application hosting on the Amazon cloud via the Engine Yard AppCloud service.
[ InfoWorld's Paul Krill reported last month that Version 3.0 of Ruby on Rails is expected to be offered in a release candidate format next week. ]
'[XCloud is] an expansion of our PaaS (platform as a service,)" said Jim Shissler, Engine Yard marketing director.
The xCloud service uses infrastructure-as-a-service capacity from Terremark Enterprise Cloud, offering SAN storage, guaranteed resources, hardware support, and compliance guarantees, including SAS70 and PCI, Engine Yard said.
Terremark differs from Amazon in that it can, for example, let users add components such as security infrastructure. Capabilities for high I/O requirements and for maintaining a high application load on a database are featured, Shissler said. Amazon does not support these capabilities at the same level as Terremark, he said.
"Basically, if you've got a Rails application that requires enterprise-grade infrastructure, this is going to be a great product for you," Shissler said.
"If your application is more complicated, if you require specific SLAs, or if you need to use custom hardware, then xCloud would be the proper product for you," he added.
Engine Yard has supported such Rails applications as social gaming, e-commerce, and media systems.
Engine Yard's PaaS services require no vendor lock-in, improve application performance by 20 to 30 percent, and accelerate development by eliminating the need to manage hardware, Engine Yard said.
The xCloud service begins Thursday, with entry-level pricing of about $3,000 for five servers.
Engine Yard formerly had its own hosting service but is moving those customers to xCloud or AppCloud. The company's services also support applications based on other Ruby frameworks including Merb and Sinatra.
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