Monday, May 11, 2009

It's Not Always Sunny in the Clouds

At RailsConf last week I gave a talk called "It's Not Always Sunny in the Clouds" where I shared all of our lessons learned with OtherInbox and cloud computing.  I tried my best to go beyond the hype and talk about our real world experiences.  The slides are below, but here's the raw list of lessons:
  • “Everything needs to be automated”

  • Autoscaling is the easiest part

  • Think carefully about credential management

  • You really could use internal DNS

  • It's maybe not that cheap

  • Launching servers is not that fast

  • You will become dependent on “glue” services

  • You will depend on a distant faceless provider

  • Use DVCS

  • You will spend a lot of time on monitoring

  • Your logs will runneth over

  • Write lots of “in-process tests”

  • Snapshots are slow

  • Rails will be the least of your worries

  • Cloud services involve subtle-yet-massive tradeoffs

  • SQS guarantees delivery at least once

  • Queue lengths inaccurate for <>
  • SQS not necessarily FIFO

  • So you may not want a cloud queue

  • SimpleDB optimized for writes, not reads

  • You must code defensively

  • There are no good "cloud sandboxes"

  • Pay attention to MySQL timeouts

  • "User account management is -not- ideal."

  • You are locked-in to your provider

  • Relational DB may not be the best choice

  • Is there a benefit?

    • Changes the way you write code

    • You can start right away

    • Pretty awesome redundancy



It's Not Always Sunny in the Clouds
View more presentations from subelsky.

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Friday, April 17, 2009

My tutorial at RailsConf 2009

I'm teaching a three-hour tutorial at RailsConf 2009 on SproutCore and Rails, called "Building Next Generation Web Apps with Rails and SproutCore".  Since three hours isn't a whole lot of time, I wanted to post some things that students can do to prepare to get the most out of the training.

See you in Las Vegas!

Prerequisites

We'll use the stable release of SproutCore (0.9.23) although I plan to address what's different about the 1.0 API which is currently in alpha testing.  So to be able to work in the tutorial, you'll need recent versions of Ruby and RubyGems.  Follow these directions to install SproutCore.

Note that the SproutCore gem depends on merb-core (>= 0.9.9), erubis, rubigen, and mongrel.

Before the tutorial starts, you must be able to view localhost:4020.  If that works, you know everything installed correctly.

This may go without saying, but you also need to have Rails 2.3.x installed.  Specifically you should be able to load the Rails startup page on your development machine at http://localhost:3000/.

Recommended Reading

I strongly recommend you complete the "Hello World" tutorial on the SproutCore home page. You may also want to browse the project wiki to get more of a sense of the framework.

The most helpful wiki articles to read include:

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Monday, June 2, 2008

RailsConf 2008 Recap

I wrote up a few articles on the OtherInbox blog about my experiences at RailsConf 2008:
The best blow-by-blow coverage so far is from Drew Blas.  Of the ones I attended or heard the best feedback about, I most strongly recommend looking at the slides for these: 

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