Sunday, March 15, 2009

Scaling Rails in the Cloud

Yesterday at SXSW Interactive I gave a talk called "Scaling Rails in the Cloud", about our experiences building OtherInbox using Amazon Web Services. My slides are below. When I wrote this presentation, I really came to the realization that Rails has hardly ever been the problem for us, scaling-wise. The framework has served us very well; all of our problems have stemmed from we the developers not understanding our tools as well as we could have, or not thinking things through. So the actual Rails content is light, but that's because Rails fits right into a cloud environment and we didn't have to do anything special to make it work.

Scaling Rails Applications In The Cloud

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Labels: rails, scaling, sxsw

4 Comments:

At March 15, 2009 8:26 PM , Greg G. said...: Kind of bummed I missed this...would you be interested in re-presenting it to, at the very least, me one day at the hive during lunch?
At March 17, 2009 6:23 AM , Mike Subelsky said...: Sure! Absolutely! Could also do it at Bmore on Rails.
At April 8, 2009 3:09 PM , Jeffrey L. said...: Where do y'all put the database? According to Mosso (an AWS competitor), EC2 instances aren't persistent, i.e., the instance crashes, any local data is lost.
At April 17, 2009 1:27 PM , Mike Subelsky said...: We keep the database on an EC2 instance. EC2 instances can mount Elastic Block Stores as disk partitions, which means when the DB crashes no data is lost. We backup those block partitions all the time, though, just in case.