SAN FRANCISCO, US: Engine Yard, a provider in Platform-as-a-Service for Ruby on Rails, announced that it has introduced Engine Yard xCloud, an expansion its cloud platform for deploying and managing Ruby applications in the cloud.

Both Engine Yard PaaS products, xCloud and AppCloud, run on the company's optimized Rails 'stack' and take advantage of similar features for managing and deploying applications. However, xCloud utilizes a more extensible Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to better meet the demands of Ruby applications that require customizable hardware, SLAs, or need to meet security and compliance standards such as PCI or SAS70, said a press release.

The Engine Yard AppCloud and xCloud products are based exclusively on open source technology, there is never a risk of vendor lock-in, and applications can be easily moved. The stack is customized and fully-managed.

Engine Yard AppCloud and xCloud products eliminate the overhead of managing complex middleware, saving valuable development cycles so teams can get products to market faster

"We created xCloud in response to growing demand from customers who want to run Ruby on Rails applications in the cloud, but require strict regulatory compliance and low-latency, high-throughput disk I/O for superior database performance," said Tom Mornini, Engine Yard CTO and
co-founder.

He added, “ xCloud levels the playing field in those dimensions against competing platforms such as Force.com and Microsoft Azure, both of which use proprietary languages. Our products are fully open source and deliver all of the benefits of a PaaS with zero-fear of vendor lock-in."