Engine Yard Sees Ruby As Cloud SpringboardEngine Yard Sees Ruby As Cloud Springboard

Providing programming platforms in the cloud, which seemed a little simple-minded when they first appeared--after all, programmers were already skilled at using the cloud, so how was the platform going to hold onto them--may not be so silly after all.

For one thing, everybody is starting to think it's a good idea. VMware is doing it with the Spring Framework and CloudFoundry.org. Red Hat is doing it with Ruby, Python, and PHP in OpenShift. Microsoft did it with Windows Azure and its .Net languages. And Heroku did it for Ruby programmers.

Another Ruby adherent in the cloud is Engine Yard, perhaps less well known than its larger San Francisco cousin, Heroku. Engine Yard is a pure platform play. It provides application building services on its site and, when an application is ready for deployment, it handles the preparation and delivery, either to Amazon Web Service's EC2 or Terremark, now part of Verizon Business.

Engine Yard hosts nothing itself. It depends on the public cloud infrastructure behind it. Nevertheless, Ruby programmers don't have to do anything to get their applications up and running in the cloud. Engine Yard handles all the details, and monitors their continued operation.

So what did the management of Engine Yard, a San Francisco-based cloud service for Ruby programmers, think last December of the acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce.com for $212 million. "We couldn't be happier," said Tom Mornini, co-founder and CTO as he sat down for an interview at Interop 2011 in Las Vegas, a UBM TechWeb event.

"Five years ago, I said, 'Ruby is it,'" he recalled. He respects Python and knows programmers at Google like that open source scripting language. But he thinks he made the right call in betting on Ruby. "Python is going nowhere. You're not seeing the big moves behind Python that you do with Ruby. You're not seeing major new things in PHP. For the kids coming out of college, Ruby is hot," he said.

Mike Piech, VP of product management, gave a supporting assessment. Salesforce's purchase was "one of several moves validating this space." Piech is four months out of Oracle, where he once headed the Java, Java middleware, and WebLogic product lines. "I love being at Engine Yard," he said.

When asked what's different about Engine Yard, he succinctly answered, "Everything." Mainly, he's enjoying the shift from big company to small, with more say over his area of responsibility. Ruby is something of an anomaly in the programming world, where most modern languages, including Java, are produced by committee. Ruby is the output of a single Japanese programmer, popularly known in the United States as Matz, and regarded as someone who hewed devotedly to the concept that a language should be built from simple concepts and its source code should be readable, something like English.

"Ruby has the traction to be the language of the cloud. You're typing very little and getting big results," said Piech. (Some PHP adherents would argue they also use the language of the Web and cloud.)

Ruby has also been boosted by the Rails framework that is built atop the language, accelerating a programmer's ability to produce applications and big Web operations, such as Twitter and Groupon.

Engine Yard is a sponsor of JRuby, employing three full-time developers for the project that allows Ruby code to be converted into Java byte code and run in the Java Virtual Machine.

Engine Yard also supports the Rubinius project with two developers. Rubinius has created a native virtual machine for Ruby code. A virtual machine makes a language more portable, since it can be configured for particular hardware architectures, leaving the application code unchanged.

A Ruby platform isn't servers or disks in the cloud; it uses the Amazon and Terremark public cloud servers. Rather, Engine Yard is the embodiment of platform as a service, or "expertise of scale," as Piech likes to put it. Engine Yard provides specific assists supplied from the platform, such as fast text search for a Ruby application, high availability, and disaster recovery.

The later proved surprisingly useful when Amazon's Eastern data center hiccoughed April 21, and Engine Yard started transferring customers out of there when it realized the problems were serious. No Engine Yard customer has complained about the consequences of the incident, thanks to Engine Yard's transfer service, which was still in beta when the incident occurred, Mornini said.

"We want to continue to give developers the ability to do cutting-edge things," said Piech. "We've left lots of knobs for people who want to experiment."

Still, the creation of Engine Yard, which with 2,000 customers is beginning to look like a valuable property, was something of an accident. Says Mornini, "It's very pragmatic, very humbling. (Co-founder) Lance Walley and I wanted a consulting company with five employees so we could get healthcare. We accidentally landed in the cloud. There are 100 employees now. I am highly conscious this was a lightning strike."

Engine Yard has received $38 million in three rounds of venture capital funding. "There won't be any need for a fourth," said Mornini. Revenue increased 125% and customers 100% in 2010.