Engine Yard
More info
- Released
- 2006
- Type
- PaaS for Ruby on Rails
San Francisco company that, during the Rails boom, was where you deployed your Ruby app if you didn't want to babysit servers.
Engine Yard launched in 2006, when Ruby on Rails was hot and deploying it was notoriously fiddly. It offered managed hosting, first on its own hardware and later on top of AWS, which made it an early PaaS vendor. Rival Heroku was simpler and slicker; Engine Yard gave more control to those who wanted it.
It was also a patron of the Ruby world. It employed the developers behind Merb, which merged into Rails in 2008 to become Rails 3, and for a while funded work on both JRuby and Rubinius. Once the Rails wave receded, Engine Yard became a niche player, and in 2017 it was bought by DevFactory, a firm that makes a business of acquiring mature software.