It's Not Always Sunny In the Clouds: Lessons Learned

In theory, Rails’ shared-nothing architecture is ideal for cloud computing, because increasing capacity is simply a matter of adding more servers to your deployment, and server power becomes an instantly available commodity. In practice, building on a cloud platform introduces many new points of complexity as well as new opportunities and new ways of doing business, and any company thinking of cloud computing as just-another-VPS will be sure to make mistakes.

These issues will be illuminated via a case study of OtherInbox, a Rails startup that launched at in September 2008 at Techcrunch50 and experienced a 2700% increase in usage over a seven week period. The challenges will be presented in a lesson-learned format and will include:

• Ephemeral servers and unreliable data stores (making backups a central part of the app)
• Automatic scaling using RightScale, Scalr, or PoolParty
• Automatic server provisioning and deployment
• Use of dynamic DNS
• Centralized logging
• Handling exception notification
• Useful gems and 3rd party libraries
• Asynchronous processing
• Making schema changes
• New deployment and rollback techniques
• System administration challenges
• Security concerns including firewall configuration
• Setting up staging environments
• Real financial costs
• Adapting MySQL (including MySQL master-slave relationships)
• Performance measurement

Although OtherInbox is built on Amazon Web Services, the discussion will be vendor-neutral and applicable to all cloud computing platforms. Audience members will leave this conference session with the answers to these questsions:

- Does cloud computing hype match reality? - Should I build my next business in the clouds? - How well does Rails really perform in a cloud environment? - What’s different about designing a Rails app for the cloud?

Speaker interview with Mike Subelsky