The Launch: Dos and Don'ts of Real Life Deploys

This talk will be a high level overview of the techniques and processes required to successfully launch a production Rails application, stopping along the way to focus in on code patterns, plugins, and applications which are a requisite for success. We’ll skip the basics like version control or Capistrano and concentrate on the less obvious but vitally important topics such as running a successful beta, data backups, prioritizing features, dealing with management, performance testing, user testing, scheduled downtime, unscheduled downtime, monitoring, and redundancy & failovers.

Vital plugins and gems will be discussed, as will task and workflow automation—things you’ll need to know when your app is getting hammered with fresh, optimistic users. We’ll also touch on the hows and whys of scaling: when to worry, the first steps, common solutions, and where to go for help.

Finally, horror stories and big “don’ts” will be discussed—surefire ways to have a failed launch. Nothing will be theoretical: the talk will be rooted in knowledge acquired launching multiple Rails sites for a big company (CNET Networks), client sites for smaller businesses, and my own company’s site, FamSpam.

The talk will be for novice to intermediate developers—people who have never launched a site, or who have launched a site or two but don’t feel it went as smoothly as it could have.