We’re thrilled to announce the Engine Yard PaaS V5 release!

This is a platform-wide upgrade that comes with a long list of new features, the latest versions of Ruby, PHP, NodeJS, and much more.

In addition, once you’ve written your application in the language of your choice, you can choose to deploy it on our new Docker infrastructure.

Why Us?

Engine Yard is ten years old. For a decade, the support team at Engine Yard has been taking care of application developers like you. Twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, Engine Yard provides deep engineering, database, and operational support to thousands of customers.

We believe in what we do, so we measure 100% of our support calls and publish the results publicly on our web site. With over one billion AWS hours run on Engine Yard, we have proven we can get your software deployed fast, and keep it running successfully. Every time.

Here’s what Charles Ju, CTO of PennyPop, has to say about V5:

“PennyPop has been using Engine Yard for several years now and we’re very satisfied with their service. With Engine Yard, we can easily deploy changes across multiple instances with the touch of a button, which saves us tremendous amounts of time. The switch to v5 allows us to work much more effectively by providing us the ability to connect to the latest technology, including Postgres 9.5. Engine Yard also has superior customer service, which allows us to minimize troubleshooting time so we can focus our efforts on our game development.”

How to Get Started

If you’re new to Engine Yard, visit our pricing page and get a $1,500 credit.

We’re certain that once you’ve used Engine Yard V5 and talked to our support team, you’ll want to move onto our platform. If you need help, we’ll coach you through the transition—every step of the way. Whatever It Takes.

If you are already running on our platform, please fill out the contact form or email us for a special offer. We can help you upgrade to V5!

What’s New

Operating System

The foundation of the Engine Yard PaaS is a curated and carefully tuned OS. With V5, that OS is the Engine Yard Gentoo Linux 2016.06 distribution, advanced to kernel 4.4.x. A new portage server infrastructure has been integrated, and a number of security updates have been pre-built into this distribution.

With this release, PHP has been upgraded to the 5.6 and 7.0.6 series, with support for NodeJS upgraded to the 4 and 5 series.

Finally, Ruby 2.3, nginx 1.8 and PostgreSQL 9.5 are all supported.

Cookbooks

The V5 cookbook infrastructure has been updated to utilize Chef 12. And most Chef 12 recipes can be ported from V4 and run easily.

Custom Chef has adopted an overlay architecture. This allows customers to fork our core recipes and tune or amend them to meet their needs. Engine Yard V5 will overlay the customer’s code on top of our code, running it all in a single Chef run.

To find out more details, check out our docs.

Webstacks

Enzyme, the software that coordinates Chef runs, has been upgraded to 2.0.

Enzyme 2.0 has a cleaner CLI, and includes features that make our customers much more productive at writing and debugging custom recipes. Chef 12 and Enzyme also support better encapsulation of the various data sources utilized by our customers.

Numerous components of the Engine Yard PaaS have been rationalized and structured. Setting up an instance has been broken out into logical roles like load balancer, application, and database master. Port mappings have been standardized between solo and clustered environments and will remain constant, easing migration.

Docker

You can now run Docker containers on utility instances through custom chef recipes.

The utility instances use EBS volumes that are backed up by the Engine Yard platform. This makes our Docker support useful for both stateless and stateful containers. For example: Memcache and Redis which can save data to the EBS volume.

Applications written in any language can be deployed on Engine Yard V5 through the supported use of Docker containers.

To find out more about Docker on Engine Yard V5 check out our Docker recipes.

Wrap Up

The Engine Yard PaaS V5 release is a huge milestone for us. We’ve added lots of new features, including Docker support. We’ve also improved and upgraded a whole host of things. For more a more detailed overview of what’s new, see our stack documentation.

We’re constantly working hard to provide a best in class platform that is stable, secure, and easy to use. And when you join us, we’ll help solve your ongoing deployment and support needs, so you can focus on what it is you do best.

Sound interesting? Get in touch and let’s talk about how we can work together.