TakeFive Interviews Ari Lerner

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.

Tags: ari lerner, interview

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