It’s either foolhardy or a market-share-grabbing stroke of genius but Engine Yard has announced it is offering a 500 hour free trial of its AppCloud for developers wanting to test launch their applications.
While many companies offer free trials of their services, 500 hours with 1.7GB of memory is potentially a game-changer that could leave competitors scrambling to catch up.
Engine Yard is offering developers the opportunity to test for free one of their current Ruby on Rails, Sinatra or Rack applications on AppCloud or, if they don’t yet have an application of their own, to try it with the open source Fat Free CRM application.
“We want you to test-drive AppCloud with the same configuration that many of our customers use for their production applications,” Engine Yard’s Nic Williams said on his blog today. Those with an existing application running on another provider can take advantage of the free trial using the EV-Migrate tool.
Williams’ blog also quoted Webficient founder Phil Misiowiec, who said the offer made it easier for partners (like his company) to demonstrate the power of deploying Ruby on Rails apps in the cloud to new clients.
“We can now also start coding instantly and worry about the accounting later – as well as take advantage of upfront cost savings,” he said.
