I gave a talk today at the #prorubyconf on Ruby Deployment, past present and future. You can view my slides below.

We will start doing some private beta testing of our new EY platform in December so let me know if you want to beta test and havce some interesting apps to run in the cloud.

Umm, w00t! It’s been a little over two years since merb was a twinkle in my eye, and a pastie. Since then it has undergone many drastic transformations, working its way towards a very solid, fast foundation for people to build their homesteads on.

It’s very exciting for me to see it grow into what it wants to be, based on the awesome merb community that has popped up around the project. It just shows that if you put in the work on something you love, polishing every little corner it will attract other like minded individuals and they will help you take the project to levels higher then your wildest dreams.

So, gem install merb and get the 1.0 final now, it is propogating its way through the rubyforge tubes. If you can’t get it from the ‘forge yet then you can get it from our gem server:

gem install merb—source http://edge.merbivore.com

Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen with code, feedback and blood, sweat and tears. It’s been totally worth the effort IMHO.

The merb is dead, long live the merb.

Just a quick post to share some news. I just finished giving my keynote at MerbCamp about past and present merb and the core tenets of merb development.

I also introduced Nanite: self assembling cluster of ruby processes

You can watch the full video of my talk here: Keynote Video

WMV format ^^ Thanks to Matt Jaynes for mirroring the video on a higher bandwidth connection

And you can see my slides on slideshare below.

Thanks to all the merbcamp organizers, the venue is awesome and I have never spoken at a ruby conference that streamed all of the talks live. Very cool setup here.

I will follow up with some more posts on nanite and the what why and how of it shortly. But you can get a pretty good overview of it by watching my talk.

We’ve got a few job openings I wanted to float out there for your consideration. Here are the listings:

Ruby Developer

Systems Engineer in Sacremento

Systems Engineer

We need another team member for the Vertebra project. You know ruby like the back of your hand and are interested in distributed systems as well as learning erlang.

Systems engineers work on our cluster systems and will help with our custom Gentoo linux build as well as be involved with the Load Balancers, Switching Fabric, Linux, Xen, Coraid and helping design the latest and greatest platform for running Ruby applications in the cloud.

If you think you have the chops for any of these jobs then we want to hear from you. Please send a resume and a short email describing who you are and why you kick ass to jarnold@engineyard.com and cc ezra@engineyard.com

I gave a talk on Vertebra today at Pivotal Labs. This time it was a bit more technical then my last talk at railsconf as the system has evolved since then. We’re working furiously on this thing and hope to have the first release very soon.

We will be opening up an early beta for a few folks so if you have some wicked cool idea you want to use Vertebra for get in touch and a few people can get added to the early access.

Video was taken today of the talk and should get posted online within a few weeks.

Slides are on slideshare here if you cannot view the embedded version below.

Valery Kholodkov has written a very cool nginx module for handling uploads.

The way this works is that you specify a location block to handle the uploads. So if you are using the standard nginx.conf for rails apps then you would add this in your server block right above your “location /” block:

    # Upload form should be submitted to this location
    location /upload {
      # Pass altered request body to this location
      upload_pass   /internalupload;

      # Store files to this location
      upload_store /tmp;

      # Set specified fields in request body
      upload_set_form_field $upload_field_name.name "$upload_file_name";
      upload_set_form_field $upload_field_name.content_type "$upload_content_type";
      upload_set_form_field $upload_field_name.path "$upload_tmp_path";
    }

    # Pass altered request body to a proxy
    location /internalupload {
        proxy_pass   http://mongrel;
    }

Then make a simple upload form that does a multipart POST to /upload. Now you can have your Rails or Merb app on the backend with a route called /upload. In the action of your app that responds to the /upload route you will get a set of params that look like this(assume the name of your upload fields is called ‘file1’ and ‘file2’):

{"file2.path"=>"/tmp/0000123459", "file1.path"=>"/tmp/0000123458",
"file2.content_type"=>"image/png",  "submit"=>"Upload",
 "file2.name"=>"Picture 2.png", "action"=>"index", 
"file1.name"=>"Picture 1.png",  "controller"=>"test", 
"file1.content_type"=>"image/png", "test"=>"value"}

What this is doing if parsing the multi-part mime boundaries in C in the nginx plugin, putting the parsed files into files in /tmp and then stipping the multipart stuff out of the POST body and replacing it with the info you need to get the name and location of the file on disk.

This means that by the time the request hits your application, the expensive mime parsing is already done and you simply move the file to it’s final resting place. This is a huge win since now the hard work is done in C in nginx before your app ever gets involved.

Of course this is a fresh new module so do your own testing and deciding whether or not this is a fit for your needs. But I think this is a great plugin and have verified it works as advertised.

Man it seems like yesterday that Engine Yard was a small 3 person startup with big ideas and little cash. People seemed to like what we were offering and the business grew into a thriving startup.

In the beginning we only had plans to be the best fully managed rails/ruby hosting company. And I think we met this goal early on. But it became apparent that we had a strong brand and we started kicking around ideas of becoming an open source software company as well.

We believe in Ruby as a platform, and we’ve put our money where our mouth is when we sponsored Rubinius and Merb, hiring many developers to work on both projects.

Engine Yard has become much more then just a managed rails hosting company, we want to strengthen the Ruby ecosystem for everyone by providing the infrastructure and open source software for the next wave of Ruby deployments in the cloud.

We’ve also been delving into the cloud computing arena as I think the next 5 years are going to see huge transition from standard hosting models into the cloud. Our upcoming Vertebra project is a new application programming platform for building distributed cloud applications with XMPP. You can expect to see the first open source release of Vertebra this summer, I think this is a truly unique and very fun project to work on. I think a lot of folks out there will have tons of different use cases for it.

So fast forward to right now, Engine Yard now has more then 80 employees worldwide. Half of these people are Application Support and SysAdmins working to support all the awesome applications we host. Providing 24/7 support. But we also have a growing Engineering team working on all kinds of exciting stuff. I consider myself lucky to work with such a talented team.

So with all that being said, I’m excited to annouce that we have just closed our Series B round of VC funding totalling $15million dollars(insert austin powers joke here)! This round includes investment from NEA, Amazon and Benchmark.

We’re going to use this money towards making Ruby the platform of choice for cloud computing and web development in startups and the enterprise alike.

Watch this space, we have lots of exciting announcements in the coming months. I’d like to thank all of our customers and users of our open source software and the Ruby community in general. It has been a wild ride these last 2 years and I expect many more exciting things to come!

Chris Matthieu and Steven Bristol interviewed me for the Rubyology Podcast a few days ago and they have posted the interview here. I talk about my early days of computing, merb, vertebra, rubinius and the story behind how Engine Yard got started and has grown. I’ll warn you though it’s a long interview, 120 minutes! Have a listen if you want to hear the story.

I’m going to be speaking at Oreilly’s Velocity conference next week on Monday June 23rd. Velocity is a conference about Web Scale operations and performance, lot’s of stuff about infrastructure and cloud computing.

I’ll be giving a short talk on Vertebra at 4:45pm on Monday and I will also be on a panel called “Getting into the Clouds” with some guys from Amazon, 3terra, Rackspace and joyent at 3:45pm. Should be fun.

Come see it if you’re in the area or already coming to the conference.

Velocity Conference

I’d like to point folks to our new Engine Yard Express VMWare image. This is a replica of an EY slice that you can download and use locally whether you are an EY customer or not. When you boot it up it will autotune mysql to use the proper amount of ram, boot up a merb and a rails app along with nginx and monit et all. It will give you a user/pass and show you the IP address as part of the boot process. So just boot it up and peek at the IP address on port 80 and port 81, the index pages of the rails and the merb app have detailed instruction on how to get a deploy.rb and deploy your own code.

Enjoy!