Project Mercury Beta!

With great pride, and after six alpha-level releases, I'm announcing of our seventh iteration on the Project Mercury stack, finally baked enough to call "beta". This release is a milestone: our course is now locked in for the 1.0 release.

At this point, we know that many people are using the Mercury EC2 image (or the same stack) in production environments, and we've tuned this release conservatively to prevent it from breaking down under heavy load. We've also verified that the stack will work under a resource-constrained VPS (e.g. one with 1/4th the RAM of a small EC2 image), which gives us more confident that this configuration is stable.

You can find the EC2 image in the US and EU availability zones with the following manifests:

• chapter3-storage/PANTHEON-pressflow-mercury-0.7-Beta.manifest.xml
• chapter3-storage/PANTHEON-pressflow-mercury64-0.7-Beta.manifest.xml

Thanks to all the people who have provided critical encouragement and feedback as we've developed this toolset over the past three months. Over 300 Mercury instances have been launched so far!

The next steps are zeroing in on 1.0 release, making the image available in other places (e.g. RackSpace Cloud, VMware marketplace, etc) and working to get a "hosted" version of it online through a number of partners.

More exciting news to come. Stay tuned, as always, and let us know what you're thinking about.