New Relic is exactly the sort of company that is re-wiring the services industry: it’s easy to get started, powerful and deployed entirely from the cloud.

Yesterday at Djangocon 2011, the company
announced beta support for Python application monitoring. New Relic offers performance management for applications hosted in the public cloud, and has partnerships with many providers, including RackSpace, Heroku and Engine Yard. New Relic now officially supports five languages: Ruby, Java, .NET, PHP and Python.

This news is important as it reflects the emerging need to provide support for the various apps that are being deployed to the cloud on such a mass scale.

Further validation is the news that Chris Cook is joining New Relic as president and COO. Previously, Cook was SVP of the Service Assurance unit at CA Technologies.

New Relic provides performance monitoring with a software-as-a-service model. It’s a simple one click install with some partners, and with others, such as AppsFog (formerly known as PHPFog), New Relic supported is provided automatically. New Relic offers performance analytics, scalability analysis, notifications and more to provide a deep look at how and why applications are performing and what can be done to speed them up. It now provides real-time user monitoring as well.

As for where the company is going next, Brian Doll, an application performance engineer at New Relic, tells me that though the company has no firm plans, it has several requests from customers to support, of all things, Erlang. Also, New Relic doesn’t officially support Scala, but some customers are successfully using New Relic to monitor Scala applications, so Doll says the company is considering official support of that language as well.

Services Angle

New Relic’s news reflects the trends towards more diversification in platforms for both enterprise developers and ISVs. Languages like Ruby, Python, Scala and Erlang are increasingly popular, as are NoSQL databases like Apache Cassandra, Apache CouchDB, HBase and MongoDB.

It’s also reflective of the platforms it partners with. Now that both Heroku and Engine Yard now support two mainstream programming languages each, there are very few, if any, single language platform-as-a-service providers. New Relic also partners with infrastructure-as-a-service providers like Joyent and Rackspace, where customers can run anything they want.

New Relic is exactly the sort of company that is re-wiring the services industry: it’s easy to get started, powerful and deployed entirely from the cloud.