[Chirb] Rails Scaling Experience?

[Leon Chism]

Hi Troy. I'm currently the CTO of a Rails based startup called  
Viewpoints.com and was formerly the Chief Architect at Orbitz, so I  
know a bit about scale, Java, and Ruby. I'd like to help if I can, but  
it probably makes sense to get into the details of their concerns. If  
you want to do that on this list, that's fine, otherwise you can email  
me directly at leon at chism dot org.

To get the conversation started:

I'm curious what "large scale Rails deployment" means to you. We are  
not small, but we aren't huge either (Alexa 38,040; Compete 5,684). We  
have spent a fair amount of time thinking about the metrics to track  
and how to recreate some of the tools we used in the Java world for  
ops/monitoring/management.

It sounds like the issue is scaling but might also be  
operationalization of the platform. Have they raised more specific  
concerns than "we know java better"?

leon

On May 27, 2008, at 4:00 PM, Troy Denkinger wrote:

> All,
>
> I'm right in the midst of advocating for use of Rails on a project I'm
> in the middle of.  I manage a team that has created a service that
> runs on Rails.  To date we've been in development and haven't had any
> serious outside usage, nor have we deployed on production-ready
> hardware.  We are very happy with the ease of development, how
> responsive we can be to the business requirements, and the support
> we've found within the community at large.
>
> Recently we have been asked to merge our service into an existing
> company that has always used a Java stack in their development.  They
> have a couple developers and an operations team that is comfortable
> with Java.  The major concern about using our Rails code is that they
> are concerned with scaling of Rails apps in general, and they are
> using that concern to advocate a port of the existing Rails code to
> their Java stack.
>
> I know one thing that would make the Ops team happy is to talk to
> someone who has actual experience with large-scale Rails deployments.
> I think they're being rightly pragmatic about this, and I'd like to
> find them someone to talk to.  Anyone know anyone who would be willing
> to talk a bit about what they've done to scale a Rails installation?
> I'm sure I could work up some sort of compensation for someone with
> relevant experience who'd like to share it.
>
> Regards,
>
> Troy
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