Is your website ready for Black Friday traffic? Rails
Is your website ready for Black Friday traffic? Rails
I recently encountered a discussion in a developer chatroom about how to find good ruby gems to use for projects, and how to choose between them.
The (currently-defunct, hopefully only temporarily) website ruby-toolbox.com was mentioned, as well as awesome-ruby.com, and some conversation ensued about how to properly choose between similar dependencies for a given software requirement and why it's important.
A content management systems (CMS) such as Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla can make the business of building and maintaining your website much easier. In much the same way as a CMS can take away the hassles of dealing with code, Engine Yard can take away the hassles of running your own infrastructure.
There are two kinds of apps for the cloud: ones that work and ones that don’t. The ones that work are called Twelve Factor apps, and they work because they were written specifically for the cloud. We call the ones that don’t work legacy apps. And these are designed to run on traditional VPS hosts.
In the previous post in this series, we explained how the shared-nothing architecture places additional constraints on cloud app developers. We also explained how embracing these constraints enables apps to have high scalability and high availability.
In the previous post in this series, we discovered that setting up a server before you even boot it is not only possible, but gives enormous productivity rewards in a cloud architecture. In this post, we look at the four essential principles of designing your app for the cloud.
In the previous post in this series, we learned how the pets vs. cattle metaphor teaches us a new way of approaching cloud server architecture. Instead of unique pets which require constant, individual care, we focus instead on cattle which are identical, homogenous units that can be added en masse and removed with ease. Cattle servers are, in other words, fungible resources.
I was one of the original developers on Orchestra, the PHP PaaS that Engine Yard acquired in 2011. Many of our customers were using PaaS for the first time, having come from very traditional hosting backgrounds. They were used to uploading things to FTP servers and editing config files remotely — a practice that is still widespread, despite the popularity of Git and sites like The Twelve-Factor App. It is made all the more prevalent by the fact that many off-the-shelf PHP apps are quite old, and still assume this sort of deployment scenario.
