Google App Engine launches Ruby runtime support in beta

Google today announced that its Google App Engine platform as a service (PaaS) cloud now has a runtime for the Ruby programming language. It’s available in beta, with the tooling available under an open-source Apache license.

Now people who have stuck with Ruby over the years have the choice of building, testing, and running their applications on Google infrastructure, without having to worry about maintaining the underlying infrastructure.

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“When running Ruby on App Engine, you can use the tools and databases you already know and love. Use Rails, Sinatra, or any other web framework to build your app,” Google Cloud Platform product manager Justin Beckwith wrote in a blog post. “Use PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Cloud Datastore to store your data. The runtime is flexible enough to manage most applications and services — but if you want more control over the underlying infrastructure, you can easily migrate to Google Container Engine or Google Compute Engine for more flexibility and control.”

Of course the interesting part is that Google has finally made Ruby a first-class citizen on its Google App Engine. Historically Heroku and Engine Yard were the most common PaaS choices for Rubyists, but over time they added support for more languages, and Ruby became an option on other PaaSes. It’s taken long enough, but now Rubyists have another option — and one whose underlying infrastructure regularly gets discounts, sometimes undercutting those of its competitors. Amazon Web Services has Elastic Beanstalk, and Microsoft Azure has PaaS capabilities, too.

Google App Engine first launched in 2008 and supports Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, and Python in addition to Ruby. A quickstart guide is here.