Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Scaling Rails in the Cloud With Audio and Video

At SXSW Interactive I gave a talk called "Scaling Rails in the Cloud", about our experiences building OtherInbox using Amazon Web Services. The organizers have just posted an MP3 file of the audio of my talk, so now you can view the slides with accompanying audio.

2 comments:

Jonathan Wallace said...

Hi Mike,

I just listened to the mp3 of your talk and followed along in the slides. Great talk and thanks for sharing.

I came to your site from Werner Vogels blog post (http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2009/03/keeping_your_database_simple_and_fast.html) and I'm curious if you guys could provide more information as to the cool little SSL tricks used to provide access to content.

We're EC2 and S3 customers where I work but with a somewhat different application domain profile.

Instead of supplying a bunch of messages to one S3 authenticating user, we would need to provide the same content to many people quickly. We couldn't settle on a good, robust, simple way to do this using S3 (though we tried a few) so we've punted on this issue for now and are storing the content on an EBS.

I'm interested in hearing more.

Thanks,
Jonathan

Mike Subelsky said...

Hi Jonathan,

thanks a lot for checking out my talk! SSL has been a bit difficult for us, mostly because it means you can't use CNAMEs. I'd have to know more about your situation to be able to advise you, but if youre distributing to a lot of people, you can change the GRANT list on an S3 object to make it widely available. If there are no such restrictions why not try Cloudfront?

It's easier for us because the data are partitioned by user.

-Mike