Comments on: Amazon, NEA Invest in Rails Hosting Startup Engine Yard

By: TechCrunch40 Sponsor - Agoracom

TechCrunch40 Sponsor - Agoracom — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:01:17 +0000

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

By: Webcloud World » News » $15 Million invested in a PAAS provider

Webcloud World » News » $15 Million invested in a PAAS provider — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:08:57 +0000

[...] Amazon, NEA Invest in Rails Hosting Startup Engine Yard Tagged as: amazon, engine yard, heroku [...]

By: Peter Urban

Peter Urban — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:13:47 +0000

Congratulations. We’re a happy Engine Yard customer and are glad to hear that they’re doing well.

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:54:45 +0000

@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?

By: BJ Clark

BJ Clark — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:39:22 +0000

@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.

By: Tom Mornini

Tom Mornini — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:18:15 +0000

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.

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:56:58 +0000

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.

By: Steven

Steven — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:32:24 +0000

It once again supports the long term vision of Amazon to be the leader in Ruby on Rails application company.

By: Rabble

Rabble — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:30:19 +0000

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.

By: Bryan Liles

Bryan Liles — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:48:27 +0000

Congratulations to Engine Yard! More funded companies in this space is a good thing!

By: Twitter Hosting

Twitter Hosting — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:42:30 +0000

Is this where Twitter is moving their ROR servers?

By: scott

scott — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:26:48 +0000

@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

By: Jerome

Jerome — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:06:41 +0000

Congratulations to Engine Yard!

By: Steven

Steven — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 09:19:46 +0000

A good choice.

—————————————————————————————————-
Tall singles waiting to hook up online @ Tallchat.com

http://www.tallchat.com

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 08:36:16 +0000

@BJ Absolutely right. This is late and inaccurate for the reasons stated.

By: Ivan Trajkovic

Ivan Trajkovic — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 07:44:34 +0000

I hope they will prove better than MediaTemple, which I’d never recommend to anyone…

By: Bob

Bob — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 07:20:04 +0000

It’s good to see some real news on here…but one poorly researched/written article.

By: BJ Clark

BJ Clark — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:18:16 +0000

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.

By: sk

sk — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:14:24 +0000

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

By: Nikolay Kolev

Nikolay Kolev — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:48:19 +0000

I didn’t know that New Relic a competitor of Engine Yard (or Heroku)! In fact, they are partners!

By: brianp

brianp — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:41:07 +0000

congrats !!! very good strategy

brian
http://www.themostpowerfulcompany.com

By: anon

anon — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:39:34 +0000

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).

By: Andy Wong

Andy Wong — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:23:46 +0000

Will Microsoft provide yard for ASP.NET applications? as Google and Amazon have done so.

By: s3box

s3box — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:17:20 +0000

Cool indeed.. amazon leading the way of cloud computing!

By: abeen

abeen — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:13:09 +0000

Congratulations!!! But what is Engine Yard???

abeen
http://www.imavista.com