The Ruby on Rails train has arrived at the VMware station. Engine Yard announced today a new Platform-as-a-Service offering for Ruby on Rails applications. The service will be called xCloud, and it consists of Ruby stacks hosted in Terremark’s VMware-based cloud.
Terremark has historically been aligned with VMware in cloud infrastructure. VMware’s struggle to get a commercial-grade virtualization management solution up and running has been closely tied to Terremark, where both companies have acknowledged that many of VMware’s future enterprise cloud-management tools have been developed.
Engine Yard, on the other hand, had previously dipped its toe into the cloud hosting pool, but after a short period, the company’s original cloud hosting plans were scrapped in favor of simply using Amazon Web Services to host its customers’ Ruby on Rails applications.
AppCloud, the name for Engine Yard’s Ruby stack on Amazon’s cloud offering, is essentially a managed, hosted Ruby stack running inside of AWS, but administered and paid for through Engine Yard. xCloud, though, uses Terremark instead of Amazon.
Abheek Anand, product manager at Engine Yard, said that the move to Terremark is focused on enterprises and high-end Ruby applications. “It’s the same deployment model and the same Ruby on Rails stack we used in AppCloud,” he said. “But there are a number of changes we’ve made in order to cater to enterprise application developers.”
Specifically, xCloud offers higher throughput in disk I/O and certified regulatory compliance for companies that need to adhere to standards like PCI.
For the future, the move to Terremark is a clear indication of ties between VMware and Engine Yard. “We are working with VMware. In a lot of ways, we’re some of the first big customers of vCloud,” said Anand. vCloud is VMware’s planned management suite for running data centers on VMware virtualization software. vCloud has been in development for some time now and is currently only in use by VMware partners, like Terremark.
“The biggest synergy there is around VMware validating the platform as a service model. That’s very big for us as we move into the enterprise. The fact that VMware and people like Google are waving the platform as a service banner takes that off the table for us.
“VMware is also moving ahead with the Spring model, and what we find is a lot of developers who prefer Ruby want to deploy to JRuby, and I think that’s a big net win for us.”
