Engine Yard is a commercial grade Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution that has its headquarters in
San Francisco, California. They portray themselves at the only PaaS Company that offers production
ready solutions, complete access to a user’s platform, and a deep level of expertise, all on a commercial
platform. Engine Yard believes that developers should be able to focus 100% of their energy on building
and deploying their applications without the worry of operations management.

Engine Yard video overview

Engine Yard PaaS Products

Engine Yard currently offers three separate Platforms as a Service products that offer a unique solution to
developers platform needs. These three solutions include:

1) Engine Yard Cloud

2) Orchestra PHP Cloud

3) Engine Yard Managed

Great Video explaining Engine Yard services: http://vimeo.com/engineyard/innovate

Engine Yard Cloud

Engine Yard Cloud offers users the flexibility to build a platform for a wide range of applications including small-scale web applications and larger-scale enterprise applications. In either
instance, Engine Yard Cloud offers users a reliable platform solution, elasticity, and high-availability
clusters.

Key Features of Engine Yard:

Commercial-grade Ruby on Rails stack

Automated load balancing

Vital infrastructure services including storage, web-based gem installs, system diagnostic reviews, and
the ability to backup or restore data.

Access to world-class Engine Yard support team

Orchestra PHP Cloud

Orchestra is best suited for those needing a solution to deploy, scale, and manage
PHP applications. Furthermore, it allows developers to integrate workflow, while also having the ability
to auto scale both up and down. Orchestra users also have access to premium add-ons that can be used
during the production cycle.

Key Features of Orchestra PHP Cloud:

Completely built on Amazon Web Services

Platform built on PHP 5.3 and nginx

Ability to build applications using a variety of PHP frameworks

Built-in Load Balancer to deliver load across available instances

Built in Content Management Systems (CMS) like Drupal and WordPress can be used to deploy
applications

Engine Yard Managed

Engine Yard Managed is suited for those looking for large-scale application
deployment on a rails server without the need of a large investment or staff. It includes everything
needed to run an application including an operating system, database, and application server.

Key Features of Engine Yard Managed:

Runs on the Terremark infrastructure, which gives users a customizable platform to work from

White glove service combined with Ruby on Rails expertise

Resource guarantee with dedicated system

Ability to co-locate custom hardware

Access to high performance Storage Area Network

Fully scalable platform

Engine Yard Customer List

Engine Yard’s Platform as a Service offering is currently being used by thousands of companies including:

AppBoy
Apple Inc
Mastercard
MTV Networks
Logitech
Aol

The Tough Questions

Engine Yard has had multiple reports of their Managed Platform going down as recently as June 4,
2012. Although many customers reported that the issue resolved itself quickly, this was not the case for
everyone.

Is Engine Yard responding to these types of outages in a prompt manner?

Do they need to re-evaluate their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) partner if this issue continues to
occur regularly?

According to the Engine Yard support website, it seems that all customer systems were fully operational
within a four hour time frame. Although dealing with a major outage is an inconvenience for customers,
it is bound to occur every once in a while. The real question is how a company responds to these types
of issues, and a quick look at the Engine Yard Customer Service platform shows that communication is
always open and prompt. Customers always have access to real-time updates and responses, which is
exactly what users need to build trust in a technology company.