InfoWorld review: Engine Yard Cloud

Engine Yard's documentation is excellent. From extensive tutorials to videos to podcasts, the Engine Yard platform is explained in detail at all levels. For instance, there are detailed sections on the overall platform architecture, troubleshooting, dealing with databases, and migrating to the platform, just to name a few. What's more, the Engine Yard team's extensive involvement in the community via projects such as JRuby has yielded a host of resources for all aspects of Ruby and Rails development -- webinars that educate developers, for instance, on Ruby dependency management via bundler and even beginning Rails development. In short, Engine Yard provides a path for development teams to grow into Ruby, as well as the Engine Yard platform.

Engine Yard supports Ruby and JRuby, offers a separate PHP platform, and recently announced support for Node.js. Indeed, the best-known lead developer of the JRuby project is an employee of Engine Yard. Because the Engine Yard platform provides a raw computing instance with SSH access and root privileges, you are free to install other applications, packages, and languages. Thus, while Engine Yard doesn't offer the breadth of language support as Heroku, you could certainly add Python applications to an Engine Yard managed instance, provided you wanted to maintain the infrastructure in that case. Nevertheless, the core competency of application support with Engine Yard is primarily limited to Ruby and JRuby. Note that Heroku does not support JRuby at this point.

Engine Yard: Extensive management