I just posted a lengthy article about the Morph Application Platform, Ruby on Rails, and Amazon Web Services at the Morph Labs USA Blog. Basically, there is a lot of confusion about how developers interact with the Amazon Web Services when deploying their Rails applications on the Morph Application Platform.

The takeaway from the article is simple. When you deploy your application using Morph AppSpaces, you do not interact directly with Amazon Web Services unless you want to. You will never work directly with EC2, but you could leverage S3 or SQS if you want to for centralized storage; but you don't have to. Morph completely abstracts developers from the underlying technology so developers are free to focus on development of the core product.

Check it out if you had any questions about how Ruby on Rails developers work with Amazon Web Services when leveraging the Morph Application Platform.

Labels: amazon, aws, ec2, paas, platform-as-a-service, rails, ruby, rubyonrails, SaaS

I have been actively blogging over at the Morph Labs USA blog. I will probably post something here very so often, but for now, if you want to know what is going on with me or Morph Labs, check out our USA blog or grab the feed.

My main focus at Morph is bringing the concept of a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to the Ruby on Rails community. The idea of a PaaS for your Rails applications is quite compelling, but is also difficult to wrap your brain around for those with a server-centric background. With a PaaS, you no longer think about servers or infrastructure. Obviously the benefits of PaaS to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or web start-up are great, the least of which is the reduction of infrastructure investment. The greatest gains come in the form of improved productivity by allowing developers to focus on the core product and not the underlying system administration and scalability functions.

The productivity gains from a PaaS such as the Morph Application Platform and Morph AppSpaces, that allow you to use standard development and deployment tools (such as Git, Capistrano, etc.), along with a standard language and framework (Ruby and Rails respectively) are significant. Where in the past you might have pushed features to version 2.0 (or higher) because you needed to spend time on scalability, security, and administration features or spend money on infrastructure and not developers, with Morph AppSpaces, you can pull those features back into the 1.0 release!

Developers can try out the Morph eXchange, Morph Application Platform, and Morph AppSpaces for FREE, too. Simply signup and you can start deploying your applications to show off to your friends or potential clients. If your application gains traction and you want to move into production, you can simply change the "type" of AppSpace from developer to production. You can "move" to production without actually "moving" anything. All of the pricing is detailed on the site, but the "smallest" production account, which gives you an elastically scalable, redundant system, that is load balanced, highly-available, backed-up, monitored, etc. is about US$1.00 per day!

Obviously I'm pretty excited about what Morph is doing. The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market is heating up, and Morph is right there with the first PaaS offering for Ruby on Rails applications. If you are a Rails developer, you owe it to yourself and your clients to take a look at what we have to offer.

Labels: morph, paas, platform-as-a-service, rails, ruby, rubyonrails, SaaS