mod_rails: Easy and Robust Deployment of Your Ruby on Rails Applications on Apache Webservers
Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails) enables people to deploy their Ruby on Rails applications in an upload-and-go manner, very reminiscent of the PHP way of deploying, while retaining stability/robustness and performance. Contrary to other popular Apache solutions out there, e.g. mongrel/mod_proxy, minimal configuration is required with Passenger because Passenger is clever enough to manage the Rails processes for you. This also means that you’ll be less likely to make errors in the configuration phase as well. Early benchmarks have indicated that Passenger performs on par with popular solutions such as Thin, mongrel/mod_proxy and in some cases, even better. By the time of this writing, Passenger is being beta tested by Twitter and Dreamhost in order to give a definitive answer to the question if Passenger is able to hold its own in a production environment. Other beta testers include the Ruby on Rails core team, and in particular, Passenger has received praise from David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails) and Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka Matz, creator of Ruby). During the session, we’ll show you how easy it is to install Passenger and to deploy a Ruby on Rails application with the help of Passenger. Since this will only take a few minutes, we’ll also elaborate on the diverse configuration options, as well as how Passenger could relieve you from a lot of work, resulting in a greater efficiency for your (hosting) company. For the tech savvy, we’ll also elaborate on the technology of Passenger as well as on our copy-on-write optimization for Ruby 1.8’s garbage collector, allowing Rails applications to use about 33% less memory on average.
People planning to attend this session also want to see:
Hongli Lai
Phusion
Hongli Lai is the co-founder and CTO of Phusion (www.phusion.nl), a company that specializes in offering top of the line IT products and services to high profile clients.
Even though the prior sentence was not DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) in respect to Ninh’s bio, he and Ninh think it is important to reiterate this nonetheless. After all, practice has shown that DRY isn’t necessarily desirable.
Prior to founding Phusion, he has had the pleasure of working on a myriad of open source products such as Ruby, Ruby on Rails and Autopackage, where it’s perhaps worth mentioning that the latter is being used by the Dutch Tax Department.
From his computer science study and work, Hongli has also become well versed in a variety of computer languages and paradigms and also possesses over an (almost) uncontrollable hunger for knowledge. In particular, his current interests lie at the domain of Software Engineering where the emphasis is put on software architecture.
In his spare time, he enjoys watching high-class cultural products generated by Japanese animation technology (anime). Also, he enjoys playing StarCraft with Ninh, and is looking forward to playing against David at Railsconf.
Ninh Bui
Phusion
Ninh Bui is the co-founder and CEO of Phusion (www.phusion.nl), a company that specializes in offering top of the line IT products and services to high profile clients.
Prior to founding Phusion, he has had the pleasure of working with companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and Unilever as an IT consultant and/or software engineer. Even though he is a computer science student by the time of this writing, it was during this period in time that he came to truly understand the importance of putting computer science into practice. Since all the people at Phusion share this thought, Phusion was lovingly dubbed the “The Computer Science Company”.
On a technical note, Ninh is well versed in a variety of computer languages and paradigms and possesses over an (almost) uncontrollable hunger for knowledge. In particular, his current interests lie at the domain of Formal Methods where the emphasis is put on software verification through mathematical specifications.
In his spare time, he enjoys hanging out with family and friends and in particular, going to rock and electro concerts of bands such as The Arctic Monkeys and Daft Punk. Also, he enjoys playing StarCraft with Hongli, and is looking forward to playing against David at Railsconf.
