Scaling Rails
Rails is undeniably the fastest path from idea to implementation for web applications, all the more so due to its increasing accessibility to even the most neophyte programmers. This in turn has increased the number of web apps for which scalability is an afterthought, if it’s addressed at all.
What’s the right approach to scalability? Which fundamentals should always be observed? Which ones seem to be ignored most often, and at what cost? Can (and should) any of these be solved within Rails?
We’ll answer all these and more, and hopefully provide a good set of guidelines for building scalable Ruby-on-Rails applications.
People planning to attend this session also want to see:
Bradley Taylor
Rails Machine, LLC
Bradley Taylor is the owner and architect of Rails Machine, a Ruby on Rails focused web application host. With 15 years development experience, he has worked on a wide range of software projects for the web and enterprise server environments. At previous conferences, Bradley has spoken on deployment and data center virtualization. He is also the author of the railsmachine and mongrel_cluster gems.
Ezra Zygmuntowicz
EngineYard
Ezra Zygmuntowicz is a co-founder of EngineYard.com, a scalable Rails hosting service. He is the author of the Rails Deployment book for the Pragmatic Programmers and has contributed many open source Ruby and Rails related projects such as BackgrounDrb, ez-where, Merb and Rubinius. He is a speaker at The Rails Edge, the 2006 & 2007 RailsConf and the 2007 SDForum Ruby conference as well as The Ruby Hoedown and RubyEast. He has been working with Ruby for almost 4 years now and picked up Rails in the summer of 2004. In his spare time he likes to hack Ruby and Erlang and tinker with his vintage 54 VW beetle.
Jim Meyer
With a career that’s ranged from freelance graphic design to large scale distributed computing systems architecture, Jim Meyer is obviously an advanced case of ADD in search of the next challenging distraction. While he can only blame Ruby and Rails for his sleep deficit dating back to RailsConf ‘07, he’s particularly delighted to join a community where agility is valued, iteration is key, and testing is cool.
Jim is the father of two and husband of one, all three of whom make him a better person on a daily basis.
Kevin Lawver
AOL
Kevin has been with AOL for a decade, most of that as the lead UI developer on AOL’s flagship search product. He’s also spent time consulting, training and acting as the “web standards guy” for one of the largest development organizations at AOL. Kevin recently returned to full-time development as one of the architects on AIM Pages, where he is heavily involved in standards support, evangelism and rapid development.
