

EngineYard releases Solo: Inexpensive, web-based platform for Rails - nickb
http://www.engineyard.com/solo

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evaneykelen
My first reaction was also that the $129 price tag seems steep, but then I
started doing the math: My guess is that if you want to go with EC2 on your
own that it's approximately $50 per month cheaper than Solo (see
<http://tinyurl.com/2q4e3t> for the AWS EC2 cost calculator).

However, my guess is that there is a significant number of of Rails hackers
who would be better off spending those extra $50 to get going right away
instead of messing around themselves trying to configure their EC2 instance.

Ezra mentions a lot of details in his introduction video on the EY site, such
as a hardened and and pre-compiled _nix packages (_ cough* rmagick),
optimizing MySQL memory usage etc, knowledge they have built-up over the years
within EY. Their knowledge is worth money.

The only problem I foresee for EY's Solo is that the 'end result' of an EC
instance deployed by Solo is easily copied. All the knowledge poured into the
configs are accessible by anyone with root access to the instance, and nothing
prevents you from deploying the next instance completely yourself. But if the
configuration management tools of Solo (and upcoming Flex) seriously rock than
I doubt that this will be an attractive option.

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dcurtis
Heroku is free. It's also easier and available right now. I uploaded the code
for <http://fuel.dustincurtis.com> and it was working within 10 minutes.

For most of my little fun projects, I don't need an entire instance, and Solo
is extremely expensive for that.

Also, I have a question for Engine Yard: why did you make the EC2 stuff
transparent? One of the downsides of EC2 is that it has a very complicated
pricing structure. The people Solo is targeting probably don't want to deal
with a 20 row table of different prices.

~~~
ezmobius
The ec2 stuff is transparent because we aren't trying to hide the underlying
platform. You can still utilize the full power of AWS form our system, you
just don't have to unless you really want to. Sane defaults but major
flexibility is one of the goals of this platform. That being said you may be
right and we may need a tiered pricing system tha includes certain amounts of
bandwidth and storage for a known monthly price. Time will tell as people
start top use the platform.

Also you can run multiple applications on one solo instance. Since you have
1.7 gigs of ram you can run 3-6 little apps pretty easily if you use the
apache + passenger stack.

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charlesju
Who else is saying, "YES YES YES YES YES YES YES"? haha

I am.

I think the beauty of Engine Yard and Heroku is that at some point in time,
one of these two companies (or perhaps Google), will figure out a way to "just
scale." At that point, web developers will just simply follow some basic
guidelines and never worry about system administration again. I think that
will be an extremely happy day for me.

~~~
tortilla
I got excited. Even though I don't have a need for this at the moment, I know
I will in the future.

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eli
$129 minimum isn't _that_ inexpensive. Otherwise, it looks quite clever.

~~~
pclark
$129 per month with engine yard appears to whoop Joyents equivalent
Accelerator.

1 GiB RAM, 15 GiB Storage 1/4 CPU core guaranteed, Burstable to 8

vs

~1.2Ghz 1 ECU, 1.7GB RAM 160 GB Non-persistent storage

~~~
eli
Agreed, but I think it's significant that Joyent offers a lower spec starter
plan under that for $199 _per year_.

~~~
pclark
good point. I wonder what size apps you could run on that, though.

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suttree
As a long time Engine Yard customer I can say $129 is a very good deal
considering the level of support that brings you. We've run PMOG
(<http://pmog.com>) on EngineYard from a small starting slice right up to a
real application and I've found them to consistently be responsive,
knowledgable and scale-able, if you see what I mean :)

I'd strongly recommend anyone checkout EY solo. Hearing about their plans
flex, the ability to run with passenger and soon rack, should make you realise
that they know how to handle Ruby.

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compay
It's great to see the EY folks offering support for Passenger.

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pclark
whats the differnece between this and normal EC2?

~~~
ezmobius
The main difference is that ec2 and aws in general just gives you very low
level building blocks. It gives you an api for 'give me a new server', 'attach
an ip address', 'create a new volume', 'attach volume' etc. So you have to
learn this stuff just to get your basic hardware in place. once you have that
done you will still be faced with all the sysadmin tasks involved with
configuring everything to mount and format these volumes and configure every
service you need to run. Of course you need to know what the proper setup for
a ruby app in production is and learn all the different webservers and
monitoring tools.

The idea behind ey-solo(and the soon coming ey-flex) is that you don't want to
have to learn all that stuff. We have been running and managing high volume
ruby apps in production for 2.5 years now and we have taken our whole battle
tested stack and are now offering it as SaaS.

So the goal is to save you time and hassle. We will maintain the whole stack
with constant feature and security updates as well as bug fixes and all you
need to do is write your app and leave the deployment and scaling hassles to
us.

AWS is only the beginning, this platform will soon be available on other
clouds as well as be downloadable so it can be run on any hosting provider if
you run our linux and install our agent.

This means that eventually you will be able to host _anywhere_ and still use
our automated stack to manage the servers.

~~~
goodkarma
Is there a way I can use this instead of a multi-slice conventional EngineYard
setup? Or do you have a RightScale-type thing in the works?

~~~
ezmobius
We have ey-flex coming in a few months. Flex is the multi slice clustered
version of engineyard on AWS, replicated db's autoscaling app servers and load
balancing, message queueing plus logging and monitoring aggregation services.

So the answer is yes you will be able to replicate a traditional EY cluster
setup on AWS in a few months.

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goodkarma
I can't believe so many folks are talking about how expensive it is. It's $129
per month people!!

If you're gonna launch anything that people will use you ought to be able to
monetize. If you can't, what the hell are you doing in the first place?!

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bk
I'm looking forward to the generic Rack deployment option.

