Engine Yard, a platform to build, manage and host Rails applications, raised a $15 million Series B round of funding from new investors New Enterprise Associates and Amazon. Previous investor Benchmark Capital also participated – Engine Yard has now raised $18.5 million in capital.
Engine Yard competitors Heroku and New Relic have also raised capital this year.
Amazon’s investment is clearly strategic as it expands its own web services products. Engine Yard fits nicely into Amazon’s big picture plans for application tools, hosting and management.
Engine Yard Aim For Java With RubyOnRails Platform – Read More On TechcrunchIT >>
What? Real news on TechCrunch! wtf, this is boring lets hear more about Twitter downtime and what Calacanis ate this morning !!!!!!!
This is SUCH exciting news! They seem to have fabulous relationships with their investors, and really know their stuff. I actually had a chance to sit down with Lance & Tom, CEO & CTO of Engine Yard, and they share A TON about their secrets to VC negotiation:
http://talktech...th-engine-yard/
PHP is way better than Ruby. Who needs all that shell crap. PHP-Eclipse with Subclipse is so much easier.
BTW, I’m doing my behind the wheel road test at the DMV in Pomona tomorrow morning, wish me luck. They made me retake both tests because I had a worthless Canuck license.
I was under the impression that EngineYard was doing their own infrastructure. I can’t find any references to EC2 on their site. If they aren’t on the AWS computing infrastructure, it seems like Heroku would be a better strategic investment for Amazon since they are already running a hosted Rails stack on EC2.
Very cool. Congratulations!
Congratulations!!! But what is Engine Yard???
abeen
http://www.imavista.com
Cool indeed.. amazon leading the way of cloud computing!
Will Microsoft provide yard for ASP.NET applications? as Google and Amazon have done so.
Another smart move by Bezos. I don’t think the market for Ruby/Rails will ever be as large as PHP, but by getting their hand in Engine Yard, Amazon has secured themselves a future in the sector and gained an incredibly knowledgeable team.
Also, has does Mosso get mentioned in your write up? Joyent’s offerings are somewhat similar, but Mosso is totally different. I think you should visit their site and familiarize yourself with what they offer (which isn’t much).
congrats !!! very good strategy
brian
http://www.them...rfulcompany.com
I didn’t know that New Relic a competitor of Engine Yard (or Heroku)! In fact, they are partners!
why anyone is interested in rails, when PHP and JAVA are well proven….look at twitter problems…so many problems because of non-scalable Rails infrastructure
This is got to be the worst written thing I’ve ever read here.
1. Engine Yard is direct competitor (on the surface) with Amazon. However they are building some cool cloud computing tools (see Vertebra), thus the Amazon interest. The statement “Amazon’s investment is clearly strategic as it expands its own web services products.” is so blatantly false that it’s mind boggling.
2. New Relic is in no way an Engine Yard competitor. This is insane. They make performance profiling tools for developers and list Engine Yard as an early customer.
3. Heroku is a competitor in only the most general sense, but they are on the complete other end of the customer spectrum. Engine Yard is on the leading edge of the high end market, and Heroku is on the leading edge of the new entry market with automated deployments and an in browser IDE.
Also, you guys are incredibly late on this. At minimum you should be following Ezra Z. on twitter.
It’s good to see some real news on here…but one poorly researched/written article.
I hope they will prove better than MediaTemple, which I’d never recommend to anyone…
@BJ Absolutely right. This is late and inaccurate for the reasons stated.
A good choice.
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Congratulations to Engine Yard!
@BJ Clark:
“The statement ‘Amazon’s investment is clearly strategic as it expands its own web services products.’ is so blatantly false that it’s mind boggling.”
It is unfortunate that such an obvious deal boggles your mind. You must get boggled often.
Let me help clear the fog: Right now, Engine Yard owns hardware. The OS on their hardware is a dialect of Linux (won’t go into which one to keep it simple for you). They have already created VMWare appliances of their stack.
Okay, not I don’t want to lose you here… It isn’t a stretch to imagine that Engine Yard *could* also bundle their stack into an AMI image that is compatible with Amazon’s EC2. If they were to do that, and they probably already have because it isn’t difficult to do, they could run their stack and all of their tools *on top of* EC2 instead of or in addition to having to run it on hardware they buy, install, manage, and repair.
Such a scenario is a clear win assuming that they can negotiate a deal with Amazon that insures the cost of running the stack on EC2 is less than the money they’d spend leasing and maintaining their own hardware.
Plus, it enables their customers to double, triple, etc. their stack size in a matter of minutes.
Finally, there are some people who might rather have their software running on EC2 than on a small company’s rack.
And, as a bonus, they’re probably watching as companies that also manage application scaling — but on EC2, such as RightScale — kind-of eat their lunch because RightScale can scale clusters to thousands of virtual machines really quickly in case of traffic spikes due to the fact that they’re a layer on EC2. And the future is all about traffic spikes (not really, but sort of).
I hope that helps.
– Scott
Is this where Twitter is moving their ROR servers?
Congratulations to Engine Yard! More funded companies in this space is a good thing!
EY’s competitors are Joyent and Amazon’s own EC2, and some the other folks getting in to cloud hosting for websites, not New Relic which does rails performance work.
You should know that.
It once again supports the long term vision of Amazon to be the leader in Ruby on Rails application company.
I see this as a strategic move against Google’s app engine. Python/Django is about as direct a competitor to Ruby on Rails as you can get (technological competitor, that is. I realize that Rails and Django are not companies.) By backing a technology that competes with Google’s app hosting technology, Amazon is making a play for dominance in the field.
Thanks for the nice write up, Michael, and thanks for the all the wonderful support in comments.
I read TechCrunch regularly and know that commenters here are not uniformly supportive of funded companies, so it’s really heart warming to see that Engine Yard has support in the community!
A couple of folks seem to be under the impression that we’re in competition with EC2. Nothing could be further from the truth. If EC2 had existed when we built our own cloud infrastructure, we would have considered them a potential vendor, which is how we currently view them.
I must agree with the others about the statement of New Relic being a competitor. As a partner, they are both a vendor and a client of Engine Yard, but certainly not a competitor.
@scott – Uh, I guess that’s possible, but it’s kind of like saying, “Apple should invest in Microsoft so that M$ will start buying Macs.”
If Amazon is courting Engine Yard, why would they give them money? Just so EY will spend it back at Amazon? What does Amazon get out of a hosting deal with EY that EY is paying with Amazon’s own money?
EY is not about hosting, which I’m guessing pays for itself and doesn’t need VC, it’s about a (RoR) cloud computing platform. I don’t see why amazon would want EY to run off Amazon’s CCP, but I do see why Amazon would want access to the tools/knowledge that EY is buying/building. I saw Ezra’s Vertebra demo at Rails Conf and it’s totally game changing and unlike anything else I’ve ever seen in the hosting space.They’ve effectively scaled systems administration, which, I’m sure, is very very very interesting to Amazon.
@BJ – I’m not sure that I follow your reasoning with that metaphor. I view this as a strategic move by Amazon to back Rails-based cloud computing. As Tom Mornini mentioned, Engine Yard isn’t in competition with Amazon. However, Amazon and Google are most definitely in competition in the cloud computing field. By backing Rails technology, Amazon is backing a wildly popular framework that competes directly with Google’s chosen framework in the rapid web app development space. Does that clear up what I was getting at?
Congratulations. We’re a happy Engine Yard customer and are glad to hear that they’re doing well.
Engine Yard helped us grow from 1,000,000 pages per month to 10,000,000 pages per month. We’re happy and glad to see our host is doing well.
The Greek