Engine Yard Adds Java Support For PaaS And Availability On Oracle Public Cloud

It’s Oracle OpenWorld this week and so it’s a fitting time for Engine Yard to show its support for the Oracle Public Cloud and Java, the lingua franca of choice for the enterprise world.

Oracle is an investor in Engine Yard, one of the oldest platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers. The company took the funding last year and has spent the past several months making Java a bona-fide member of the Engine Yard family.

Engine Yard is one of the most complete PaaS players in the market. Earlier this year, the company offered customers the choice of putting its platform behind the walls of a corporate data center. Now with Java support and its ability to work on the Oracle Public Cloud, Engine Yard, provides the IT giant with a service it can pop into a customer’s infrastructure. Engine Yard also works on Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure and Terremark.

In its new model, servers with a common function (such as load balancer, app server, database, etc.) are grouped together to facilitate more granular management, said Engine Yard CTO Rob Walters in an email interview today. Multiple server groups make up a complete application environment and those groups can be set up to run in different regions and can be managed, updated and scaled independently of the other groups.

The news is part of the “app anywhere” theme that has popped up in recent weeks. Apps and infrastructure are running on multiple types of platforms, be it the cloud, a company’s data center or both. Engine Yard’s new Java support exemplifies that trend.

The PaaS market is becoming a battleground for enterprise providers. The differences broke out on Twitter today when an Engine yard programmer replied to a Red Hat community manager, regarding a question I had. The discourse cuts to the heart of the competitive differences between the two providers:

@jzb with offerings from AWS, Windows Azure, Terremark, & now Oracle, I’m not sure where the “1provider” idea comes from cc: @alexwilliams

— PJ Hagerty (@aspleenic) September 24, 2013