Morph Labs and FiveRuns to elevate Ruby on Rails

Portland, USA: Morph Labs, a platform as a service (PaaS) provider for web applications and FiveRuns, the application monitoring and systems management company for Ruby on Rails announced a partnership to increase the trust and confidence of applications running in the cloud. In a two phase strategy, the companies are working together to promote application performance testing and monitoring to increase the reliability and scalability of Ruby on Rails applications that utilize Morph’s managed Platform as a Service, Morph AppSpace.

With the partnership, the companies are combining FiveRuns TuneUp and FiveRuns Manage with the Morph AppSpace environment, giving developers an enterprise class managed hosting platform that provides insight into application performance at a level that enables developers to make decisions on how and where to optimize their code.

“Ruby on Rails applications are leading the way for software as a service (SaaS) and becoming commonplace in business. With this high adoption rate for everything from departmental applications to customer-facing websites, we see an opportunity to add value by integrating a new level of application performance analysis and ongoing monitoring into each Morph AppSpace” said David Abramowski, CEO, Morph Labs.

Now available, developers can subscribe to Morph AppSpace for free and select the version that automatically integrates FiveRuns TuneUp. The developer simply deploys the application without any special modifications or hassles. The Morph AppSpace automated deployment system then activates FiveRuns TuneUp and almost instantly the developer can see the results. Using FiveRuns TuneUp, developers gain valuable insight on potential bottlenecks and performance issues. By running the application in an enterprise quality environment like the Morph AppSpace, the developer gains a clear picture of how the application will perform in production, therefore, taking away the mystery and reducing the risk.

“Our goal is to provide a forum for focused collaboration to solve interesting and difficult performance problems. TuneUp gives developers deep visibility and relevant information to debug and improve the performance of their application, and a community setting to collaborate with others to solve tough problems,” said Steve Sanderson, vice president, development and technology, FiveRuns.

Users of the integrated Morph AppSpace and FiveRuns TuneUp environment may also choose to articipate in a secure group or open community where they can share their performance information for tips, tricks and advice from a broad audience of Rails enthusiasts. FiveRuns TuneUp combined with a developer subscription to the Morph AppSpace are provided free of charge to encourage developers to test and analyze their applications.

“The rapid development benefits of Rails have been proven out thoroughly. Now the question for Rails applications centers around the rest of the application life-cycle: managing those applications in production, trouble-shooting problems, and evolving the application as needed. Collaborative IT Management offerings like FiveRuns TuneUp aim to help the trouble-shooting process by pulling in help from the greater Rails community,” said Michael Coté, industry analyst, RedMonk.

In the second phase of the partnership, Morph Labs will integrate FiveRuns Manage as a production option for each Morph AppSpace. By adding FiveRuns Manage, developers will be able to continually monitor the health and well being of each application running within a Morph AppSpace subscription. FiveRuns Manage also provides additional information to enable developers to quickly diagnose problems and proactively maintain application performance. The integrated Morph AppSpace and FiveRuns Manage solution is expected to be available in the 4th Quarter of 2008.