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Engine Yard Introduces Commercial JRuby Support

Posted by Mirko Stocker on Apr 04, 2010

Sections: Operations & Infrastructure,; Development
Topics: JRuby ,; Ruby ,; JVM Languages ,; Commercial Offerings ,; Java ,; Dynamic Languages ,; Languages ,; Business Models ,; Programming ,; Support ,; Business

After hiring Sun's JRuby team (Charles Nutter, Thomas Enebo and Nick Sieger) last year, Engine Yard now starts offering commercial support for JRuby. From the press release:

Commercial JRuby support from Engine Yard includes developer assistance and advice on how to tune and optimize JRuby in production environments. It also covers the most recent version of JRuby and the following libraries: jruby-openssl, activerecord-jdbc-adapter, warbler, jruby-rack. It also includes support for bundled JRuby components such as Joni, Yecht, and jruby-ffi.

Joni is the JRuby port of the Regex engine Oniguruma, Yecht is the YAML support, jruby-ffi is a portable way to access native code.

This support is not only for Engine Yard customers, they are "happy to help wherever your app is".

Engine Yard Support for JRuby is available for 12-month terms and begins at $2,000/month.

InfoQ talked to Thomas Enebo to learn more about this new offering. We wondered what kind of support requests they anticipate from their customers:

Most of the support requests I expect to see will be very similar to the sorts of questions we already get on our mailing lists, issue tracking system, and in our IRC channel. They will be a mix of issues in deploying to an application server; a mysterious stacktrace in their application that they suspect is a JRuby but; or a basic Ruby compatibility issue.

Largely support requests will help provide a nice normalized mechanism for people to report and diagnose problems they are having with JRuby. It will also provide us with higher quality description of problems people are having by going through a support process.

Another question is whether paying customers can influence the priority of bug fixes?

By following a process and interacting with the JRuby developers, there will be an implicit influence at play. By the time we work through the triage process the user has a reproducible test case (we will provide advice in how to create a reduced test case) then we are in a great position to just fix the issue quickly. The issue is fresh in everyone's minds and we probably have a good inkling in what it will take to solve the problem.

We may not fix the issue quickly if there is a simple workaround or the issue is trivial in impact to the user. We always need to balance fixing issues based on how to support all JRuby users best. Fixing a trivial issue at the cost of a serious one is not good for anyone.

Additionally, if a company has any needs above what we just announced today, they can always contact Engine Yard and talk to us. We may be in a position to help them above and beyond our current developer support offering.

What do you think? Does a commercial support option help JRuby's adoption in enterprises?