Amazon helps boost Engine Yard's cloud computing efforts with capital infusion

Engine Yard, which provides a cloud-based Ruby and Rails deployment platform, has completed a second round of financing, including a chunk from cloud-computing heavy hitter Amazon.

The San Francisco-based company today announced an additional $15 million in funding, following a $3.5-million injection in January of this year. Helping to provide the financing were New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA), Amazon, and current investor Benchmark Capital.

Engine Yard officials say the new funding will help the company accelerate business, spur R&D for their forthcoming cloud-computing cluster platform, and continue their innovation with their open-source projects, Rubinius and Merb.

Rubinius, a project to develop the next generation virtual machine for the Ruby programming language, implements the core libraries in Ruby, making a system accessible for development and extension. Merb is a light framework that is ORM, JavaScript library, and template language agnostic.

Engine Yard, founded in 2006, offers a deployment platform with fully managed services. This platform combines high-end clustering resources to run Ruby and Rails applications in the cloud.

Amazon has been offering cloud-based services for more than two years, and their participation bodes well for Engine Yard's position in the forefront of two emerging markets -- Ruby and Rails and cloud computing.