Build Your Own Distributed, Self-Configuring Rails Cluster

Existing Rails applications are deployed using a combination of Mongrel and a reverse proxy. This architecture provides good performance, but is brittle and difficult to disasterproof. This architecture also affords site developers little comfort or ease in deployment or management of new code versions, and requires significant amounts of work to port to extremely distributed platforms like EC2.

We will demonstrate a new, self-managing system written in Erlang called “Fuzed” that mirrors the structure of existing Rails applications, replacing both Mongrel and reverse proxies like Nginx. It dramatically reduces the complexity of deploying and maintaining a rails application, even on extremely distributed platforms. Being written in Erlang, it allows for realtime exploration and customization of the infrastructure as it is running, without interrupting service. Fuzed also attempts to provide better reliability and multiple strategies for coping with Rails resource exhaustion by opening this mechanism to the application developer for evaluation and replacement.