Ari Lerner, a Solutions Architect here at CitrusByte recently got interviewed by the guys at TakeFive.

Welcome to this week’s Rails TakeFive interview, our weekly discussion about Ruby on Rails with noted developers from throughout our community. This week, Ari Lerner of CitrusByte and among other things, creator of PoolParty, a framework for maintaining and running auto-scalable applications on Amazon’s EC2 cloud.

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FiveRuns: Amazon + Rails seems to be a prevalent choice right now, looking way back to the first instances as early as 2006, and seeing how far we have come. Can you talk a little bit about the benefits and challenges here?

Ari Lerner: Amazon’s Web Services is probably the technology that excites me the most at the moment. The unprecedented flexibility enables developers to play, explore and harness the growing landscape of cloud computing. The last time I felt the joy of working with a new technology, I was writing ‘Drug Warz’ on my Ti-83. If you have not yet looked into it, I highly suggest you take a peek.

Now to answer your question!

Cloud computing is all the rage today. Just as Rails revolutionized the web development framework, cloud computing is the next logical step in hosting, but it’s not going to solve all hosting issues. The non-technical challenge is to recognize it is just another weapon in your development tool-belt. The developer is the real secret sauce.

The largest technological challenges are configuration and maintenance of the EC2 instances. there is software on all sides of the spectrum that can aid in automating this process, from my own open-source PoolParty to commercial RightScale that aids in support.

Amazon’s EC2 makes it tempting to throw away proven techniques of deployment and management, but breaking the encapsulation of the methodologies just spells disaster. I am always in favor of using all the right tools available, but in their proper place.

I think it would be a mistake to have your application aware of its own hosting environment. You don’t want your software knowing it is running on a cloud, it should do what it does best… be the application.

That’s just a snippet of the interview. Go ahead and take a look at the full interview here.

I’m a big fan of researching and playing with new technologies (hey! I remember rails 0.7) so its no surprise that I’ve been playing a lot with Ruby Enterprise Edition and Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) and researching it as a viable rails deployment solution. For those of you who are staying with the tried and true Nginx + Mongrel, let me offer a brief introduction to Phusion Passenger (mod_rails). But first… let’s take a trip down memory lane:

Phusion Passenger is super easy to install and setup as an Apache mod and immediately simplifies the deployment of rails. It allows you to deploy a rails application without splitting your attention between the web server and app server, such as Nginx and Mongrel. You literally upload a configuration which looks like the following block of code to Apache and it manages your rails application for you.

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName  myrailssite.com
  ServerAlias www.myrailssite.com
 
  DocumentRoot /var/www/rails-project/current/public
</VirtualHost>

Passenger gives rails the same ease of deployment as mod_php and mod_perl. And when you want, it will automatically reload your app if you deploy changes.

But the real gem is using Phusion Passenger with Ruby Enterprise Edition, which is a rewrite of the Ruby MRI with optimization for mod_rails in mind. The initial benchmarks show that using both together results in lower memory usage and increased requests per second. Since then, passenger has had a myriad of early adopters reporting their results. DreamHost praised Phusion for finally solving their rails deployment, after complaining only 4 months earlier of how rails deployment options were a joke. Other websites have boarded the Phusion Passenger train too, reporting easy setup and even easier deployment.

The results look good: Dead easy rails deployment with great performance.

So how do you get started? For dead easy server provisioning, check out Sprinkle, a gem which provisions servers for you. I’ve been hard at work implementing new features and patches to Sprinkle, which you can see in my fork. I have already created the sprinkle scripts to automatically setup this entire stack on a fresh ubuntu server:

• Rails (and Ruby, Rubygems)
• sqlite3 or mySQL
• Apache2
• Phusion Passenger (mod_rails)
• Ruby Enterprise Edition

If you’re interested in the automatic setup solution, I recommend checking out the screencast I made detailing the entire process. It requires a custom version of the sprinkle gem (from my fork), which the screencast covers.

If you plan on trying it out and have any questions, leave a comment or feel free to contact me at mitchell.hashimoto [at] citrusbyte [dot] com and I’ll happily provide any assistance you may need.