SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 11/15/12 -- Engine Yard, the leading Platform as a Service (PaaS), today announced Engine Yard Local, a new development tool available on Engine Yard Cloud that further demonstrates the company's commitment to developers and the open source community. Developers now have more flexibility to accelerate the application development process and focus on innovation and building cloud-based apps. Engine Yard Local enables developers to build and test applications on local machines and later deploy to the same environment on Engine Yard Cloud. Developers also get a quick and simple way to access a remote application running in Engine Yard Local via the Internet, through a feature called Engine Yard Live.

As an innovator at the forefront of the cloud industry, Engine Yard works closely with thousands of developers on a daily basis. The company has a long track record of collaborating with customers to solve application deployment issues, build best practices and create products that address developer needs. Engine Yard introduced RailsInstaller last year, a tool that has enabled developers in the Windows and OSX communities to simplify and reduce the time it takes to set up a Rails development environment. Downloads of RailsInstaller just passed the 370,000 mark. By reducing the time and financial investments typically required to set up development and testing environments, the combination of RailsInstaller and Engine Yard Local helps developers to focus on building the best products and getting them to market quickly.

"Engine Yard Local gives us exactly what we need to speed up development," said Christopher Haupt, CTO of GreenStack, which offers mobile apps for location-based savings. "One of the biggest challenges is getting parity between our development and deployment environments. With Engine Yard Local, we can easily set up the same stack, tools, and compilers, so we have confidence in building and testing our apps locally and then moving them into production in the cloud. Now, setting up a common environment takes minutes instead of hours or days, and our developers can use that time to respond to customers and build new features."

Engine Yard Local leverages Vagrant, a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments, allowing developers to run an Engine Yard Cloud virtual machine on any system that supports Ruby. Vagrant uses Oracle VirtualBox to build configurable, lightweight and portable virtual machines dynamically. These virtual machines are managed with the Engine Yard Local software, using the same OS, system structure, provisioning and software package tree that every other Engine Yard Cloud instance uses. With Engine Yard Local, it's a simple and straightforward task to make adjustments to Engine Yard Cloud virtual machines.

"Developers have told us they want a more efficient and productive way to develop and test apps. With Engine Yard Local, we have leapfrogged the traditional approach to software development which requires a developer to commit an app to a repository, spin up a new instance and deploy the application," said Bill Platt, Sr. VP, Operations at Engine Yard. "Developers can now access a fully functional Engine Yard Cloud virtual machine anywhere, allowing them to build and test their apps on a local version of the Engine Yard stack. This makes application development easier, more flexible and faster, so developers can focus on building great apps."

Engine Yard Local supports Windows, OSX and Linux and is available today and Engine Yard Live functionality will be available in 45 days. To learn more about Engine Yard Local, visit www.engineyard.com/products/local.

About Engine Yard
Engine Yard is the leading Platform as a Service (PaaS), empowering cloud application development more rapidly, easily and cost effectively. With deep technical expertise, powerful infrastructure orchestration, strong support of the open source community, and world-class service, Engine Yard provides a trusted, commercial grade solution that enables developers to focus on creating great applications, instead of managing their platform. Thousands of customers in 58 countries, from explosive-growth Web startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, rely on Engine Yard to leverage the cloud for competitive advantage. Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., Engine Yard is backed by Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Oracle, and Amazon.com.