Engine Yard As A Service
No Hands Rails Stack
Ezra just announced a new service coming in January. They’re extracting the Engine Yard stack into an easily configurable service for booting up new Engine Yard nodes. The service is promising, even supports building nodes based on JSON. I’d expect this type of setup to replace AWS as a rails stack based on all the work Engine Yard has done on the deployment process and operations of a rails stack. The screens shown looked highly configurable, check boxes with memcached, mysql, erlang, etc. also add users, ip addresses, etc. Just about everything you would need to build a complete rails stack, with no hands.
After talking to Ezra and Vivek Engine Yard As a Service is not necessarily a web service they provide but more of a stack as a service they provide. Say you’re locked into a contract with a hosting company or you love your hosting company but they don’t know anything about building a rails stack or you’re cheap and you want cheap VPS’s, you run EYAS on your choice platform. I asked a few questions about how Engine Yard intends to go about doing this, though partnership or through an install process for the end user and it sounded like some of those things are either secret or not defined yet. Even with the specifics still a bit unclear the prospect is very exciting.
#prorubyconf08
I’m at the Voices That Matter conf in Boston. Met some old friends, met some new people. Some talks are interesting as my team is mostly operating in a vacuum rails-wise. Most of the team has experience working at larger companies but not in rails at a larger company. So it’s nice to hear what other larger companies are doing and how their rails team fits in to the business. The yellowpages.com talk was interesting to hear that most of their hits are static and not using ActiveRecord at all. I’m thinking that FanNation with it’s large amount of dynamic requests is got to be one of the larger rails installations. Also surprised to hear that NYT uses a handful of EC2 instances to do mostly page cached/generated pages. Again not much (if any) dynamic content generation.
At the end of the conference I won a prize (I think for talking a lot of shit on the irc back channel). I picked Obie’s book The Rails Way
