Engine Yard’s Deis Launches Commercial Support For Its Docker-Based PaaS

Earlier this year, cloud orchestration platform Engine Yard acquired Deis, an open-source Platform-as-a-Service project. Engine Yard has long been known for its support service and starting today, the company will also offer businesses the option to buy Deis support.

Deis is a Docker- and CoreOS-based platform that aims to give developers access to what is essentially a privately hosted Heroku. For users who don’t currently use Docker, it even supports Heroku buildpacks for running Ruby, Python, Node.js, Java, PHP, Perl and Go applications, among others. Because it’s based on Docker, it’s easy to scale and portable, and users can quickly deploy any application with the help of a Dockerfile and Docker image.

Current Deis users include Mozilla and Coinbase.

The new support offering will come in two flavors: standard and premium. The standard tier will offer web and email support during normal business hours, while the premium tier will offer 24×7 phone support with a guaranteed 30-minute response time.

In addition, Engine Yard will offer installation support, training, and help with customizing existing platforms.

As Deis founder and Engine Yard CTO Gabe Monroy told me, there will be no difference between the Deis open source offering and what the company’s commercial users will get. What Deis has done, however, is launch a new graphical user interface for the paid service that will make spinning up a Deis cluster on AWS a matter of a few clicks.

“Docker has changed the way we build, ship and run applications. Yet some companies still struggle to orchestrate Docker in a way that’s suitable for production workloads,” said Monroy. “Deis has helped a number of companies put Docker into production, as evidenced by the large community of users and contributors. With Deis PRO, it’s now easier than ever to spin up a Deis cluster that can manage Docker across a distributed system.”

Monroy also argues that the company’s advantage over similar Docker-centric PaaS services like Cloud Foundry is that it was developed after Docker launched, so it has always had Docker at its core.