Engine Yard

About Engine Yard

Engine Yard operates as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company, providing a cloud application management platform focused on Ruby on Rails, PHP, and Node.js applications. The company was founded in 2006 by Tom Mornini, Lance Walley, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, and Jayson Vantuyl. The founders were active leaders in the Rails community, and Mornini, for instance, brought nearly three decades of development experience, with a focus on software development methodologies and release management.

The company's business model is centered on abstracting away the complexities of infrastructure management, allowing developers to focus on writing code. Clients, ranging from startups to large enterprises, utilize the platform to deploy, manage, and scale their web applications. Engine Yard generates revenue through a subscription-based model, offering various plans for its managed hosting services on cloud infrastructures like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The core service is a fully managed platform that automates deployment, configuration, monitoring, and scaling. A key feature is the "git push" deployment, where the platform automatically analyzes the code, creates containers, and runs them on Kubernetes clusters. This service includes pre-configured and optimized technology stacks, automatic scaling based on demand, security updates, and automated backups. In a significant evolution of its services, Engine Yard introduced Engine Yard Kontainers (EYK), a fully managed containerized environment built on Kubernetes. This offering aims to simplify the adoption of modern container technology for developers, providing a unified cloud solution that includes a command-line interface (CLI), built-in logging with Kibana, and monitoring with Grafana.

Engine Yard's history includes several key milestones. In 2008, it secured a $3.5 million investment from Benchmark Capital, followed by a $15 million Series B round from New Enterprise Associates and Amazon. By 2009, it had raised a total of $37.5 million. The company made strategic acquisitions, including Orchestra.io in 2011 to add PHP expertise and OpDemand with its container PaaS, Deis, in 2015. In April 2017, Engine Yard was acquired by Crossover, a company that provides cloud-based Ruby teams.