We were pleased to release Bring Your Own Images (BYOI) for Rails in our Beta program back in July. Today we are happy to graduate this feature to general availability.
BYOI Overview
Bring Your Own Images (BYOI) allows developers to spin up new servers for the applications that are based on custom server images rather than on a generic Ubuntu server.
Bring Your Own Images benefits for Rails
BYOI enhances your Rails applications in the following ways:
- Because custom server images can have all the libraries and components required by your application pre-installed, such as languages and frameworks, they can dramatically reduce the time for a new server to be provisioned.
- You can use these images to quickly start servers on supported cloud providers. This means you can scale up dramatically faster. It also makes it possible to freeze a server (with a cloud image or snapshot) and create another server based on that image.
- It gives developers the flexibility to choose a server that fits better in their infrastructure, rather than relying on generic Ubuntu servers. This allows you to maintain exotic or non-standard configurations more easily.
Note: For production environments make sure that the images you have are up-to-date with the base components of your live servers, such as language or framework.
Our launch cloud partners for Bring Your Own Images are:
- AWS
- Google Compute Engine
- DigitalOcean
...with more on their way.