We've been hard at work over the last couple of months, and it's time to take our baby public to show it to the world.

So what's this all about? We've been big fans of Amazon's EC2 for years now, but there's always been something that didn't fit in with the way we work. Being able to start and stop computing resources on demand is awesome, but having to manage the instances and your application deployments can get quite tedious. The cloud was dumb. Instances didn't know about each other, your application couldn't be sure where your database is, your web server didn't always know about all instances running in your cluster.

With Webistrano we already had an easy way of deploying applications, but it wasn't fit yet for the cloud. You still had to know about all of your instances, configuring them and keeping them up-to-date manually.

That didn't really fit with our usually automated way of life. We wanted to combine both, simplified cloud provising, management, and deployment. The idea for Scalarium was born. That was more than a year ago. The dumb cloud has become casual, no need to worry about the in-depth details anymore, the tedious work of manually managing your infrastructure is now automated.

Here we are now, putting the finishing touches on it so we can let a first group of people have a private look at it. I'm gonna spare you the marketing blabber, you can have a look at our teaser page for that. If you haven't already, now's a good time to sign up for our beta.

What can I expect?

We use Rails, we love Rails, we deploy Rails. Hence, it's the framework we'll be supporting first. Don't worry though, if you want to deploy PHP applications or simply just static content, who are we to deprive you of that joy?

We wanted to keep everything as simple as possible. Not too much noise that distracts you from the thing that's most important: managing and deploying your clouds. Here's a little sneak peek at the UI as it is today. It's still subject to change, but the idea will stay the same either way. First up the view of your cloud. It contains all instances defined sorted by their role in the group.

The applications view is where you'd do your everyday business, deploying your code. When you deploy Scalarium knows about all instances and their prospective roles, deploying and configuring them accordingly. It automatically configures database, load balancer and applications so that each knows the information it needs about the others.

Who are we?

We're Peritor from Berlin, a consultancy focused on Rails and Ruby, deployment and scaling, and Amazon Web Services.

What's next?

We're working hard to make Scalarium available as a private beta, stay tuned. Our aim is to set up camp in February. We'll keep you posted.