Engine Yard Adds Node.js Support

Posted by Werner Schuster on Nov 18, 2011

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Development

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Javascript ,

Ruby ,

Web Development ,

Dynamic Languages ,

Languages ,

Programming ,

Engine Yard ,

Node.js

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Node.js is supported by a growing list of hosting providers, including it's main sponsor Joyent and or PaaS providers like Heroku. Now Engine Yard has announced it's support for Node.js.

InfoQ talked to Dr Nic Williams, VP Technology at Engine Yard.

InfoQ: Is the Node.js support a product or is it experimental for now?

Node.js support is experimental for now--that is the intent of the Engine Yard Labs program. Node.js support is enabled within the Engine Yard Cloud platform, so it is not a separate environment.

InfoQ: What's the concurrency story for Node.js on Engine Yard? Ie. can I fire up multiple Node.js instances to run code in parallel; how are these instances managed and connected?

We run Node.js behind our production stack of HAproxy and nginx. For Node.js we have patched nginx for WebSockets support. We run one Node.js process per CPU.

InfoQ: Do you use any existing solutions for managing Node.js processes?

We currently support Node.js applications directly behind nginx. There are several clustering options, each of them can be built into the application code base rather than be a stack configuration option. We're leaving the clustering choice to the Node.js developer.

InfoQ: How do you provide and scale computing resources for Node.js, ie. can a user dynamically add new computing units etc?

Like our production Ruby environments, Node.js environments can start with a single VM with an onboard database and scale upwards (using our dashboard).

InfoQ: Do you ship with support for online Javascript IDEs like Cloud9?

There is no specific support for any IDEs at this time; customers can use their preferred IDE, and there are no known issues related to IDEs.

InfoQ: Is Engine Yard using any Node.js web apps or services internally?

We are experimenting internally with test apps, but none of our production platform depends on Node.js at this time.