The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker has been updated accordingly.

Engine Yard, which essentially delivers a platform to build, manage and host Rails applications, raised raised a $15 million Series B round of funding from new investors New Enterprise Associates and Amazon last July, with investor Benchmark Capital also participating. The round brought its total amount of funding to $18.5 million.

Competitor Heroku also attracted substantial funding in 2008, but they have been spared from significant lay-off rounds so far, at least to our knowledge. Other alternatives to Engine Yard include Joyent and Rails Machine.

Unsurprisingly, Lance Walley added that the lay-offs are part of a ’slight course change’ that had been in the works for several months already, and that Engine Yard is in perfect health. Also noted is the fact that Walley is no longer the CEO of the company, and that they’ve appointed John Dillon to assume leadership of the company in order to meet new profability (and other) goals.

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New Relic, a company that focuses on helping Rails developers optimize and maintain their code, has closed a $6 million Series B funding round led by Trinity Ventures, with existing investor Benchmark Capital also participating. After a $3.5 million Series A round earlier this year, the round brings New Relic’s total funding to around $9.5 million. As part of the deal Trinity’s Dan Scholnick will be joining the New Relic board, with Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton taking the role of chairman of the board.

New Relic offers subscription-based services for developers using the popular Ruby on Rails platform. The company’s Rails Performance Management (RPM) package helps developers test their code for performance issues, presenting data in an intuitive graphical interface. To use the service, developers install the RIM Rails plug-in into their project, which then relays the data to New Relic’s servers for analysis (you can see our full post on the service here).

Since its launch earlier this year, the site has racked up an impressive list of customers, including 37signals and Github (a well-known collaborative development tool). Its initial success isn’t surprising – the site was founded by Lewis Cirne, who created a similar service for Java developers in the late 90’s that was eventually acquired (a number of his coworkers from that endeavor have joined him on the new project).

Another player in this space (also focused on Ruby on Rails) is FiveRuns.

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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 >>

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New Relic is looking to capitalize on the growing number of Ruby on Rails application deployments, having recently raised $3.5M from Benchmark Capital for their Rails Performance Management (RPM) product.

RPM is a combination of installed software and cloud services that helps developers understand performance problems in their RoR applications. A Rails developer first installs a standard plugin that continuously sends performance data to New Relic’s servers. He or she can then use an RPM dashboard to identify the specific points in their code that are causing bottlenecks.

Several brand name Rails developers are already using a beta version of the RPM service, including Rails core developer Rick Olson. While the company is reluctant to disclose its current enterprise-size clients, they are obviously going after the several billion-dollar-plus businesses already using Rails in production.

New Relic was founded by Lewis Cirne, who in 1998 started a company that offered similar monitoring software for the then-young Java application industry. Cirne successfully sold that company and has brought several of his old colleagues with him to this new Rails venture.

Other startups working to make Rails deployment less painful include Heroku, which offers online development and one-click cloud deployment, and Engine Yard, which offers managed Rails service infrastructure.

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