Ninefold preps infrastructure to help roll out Rails

Oz cloud co expands into Europe and North America

On the back of its newly-launched Rails Cloud infrastructure offering, Australian elastic public cloud outfit Ninefold has reconfirmed its ongoing expansion plans, with new presences planned for California, the US east coast and Ireland by July 2014.

Ninefold chair Peter James told The Register the data centre expansion plans are evidence of the strategic nature of the Ninefold investment to its backer, Macquarie Telecom. As Ninefold looks to expand its base in America, he said, it's important to demonstrate that “we're not just some startup with $AU500,000 behind us.”

So while Ninefold hasn't strongly branded itself with Macquarie Telecom in Australia, in the US “showing that they own acres of data centres with megawatts of power are important proof points.”

As the company puts its cloud Rails offering to the fore, James says, Ninefold's infrastructure will be a big part of its pitch. The developers its targeting “want an environment on which they can build their app, deploy it, and get it into production quickly.” Once deployed, “they want apps to scale quickly, and they want their customers to have very fast response times.”

Hence the importance of the expanding international data centre presence. Both the expansion of its infrastructure and tuning it to support the Rails offering is a big part of the effort of more than 12 months preparing the service, along with building up its in-house Rails programming capabilities.

“Rails is the developer language of choice for modern Web apps. There's something like 70,000 Rails developers in the US, and 5,000 in Australia and growing rapidly,” he said.

Performance is the Rails market's key differentiator, James said, and that brings the debate back to infrastructure ownership: “there's no double-virtualisation for our customers, and there's no margin to anybody else, because we own the whole stack.

“Amazon [where the established competitor Horoku is hosted – El Reg] is there for everyone, but it's not purpose-built for Rails.” ®