Is your EC2 server pool starting to look like this?

PoolParty can help you turn it into this:

Why would I need PoolParty?

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud has made it cheap and straightforward to run your own server pool, but there are various issues with volatility, lack of load balancing between instances, no persistent instance storage (currently in private beta). Also there is no mechanism for scaling your instances dynamically (ie, adding or removing instances as your load changes).

That is all taken care of by PoolParty, a recently open sourced Ruby gem and the brainchild of fellow CitrusByte developer Ari Lerner. PoolParty takes care of the following:

• Automatic scaling based on demand and load
• Starting/stopping instances
• Self-healing
• Provisioning and bootstrapping initial software
• Setting up S3Fuse
• Load balancing with HAProxy
• Built-in monitoring
• Plug-in architecture for extendability / customization

How?

PoolParty is based on established open source technologies that have been widely used in production. It takes your EC2 server pool, and invites S3Fuse, monit, and members of the High Availability Linux Project . Now you don’t just have a pool. You have a rocking pool party. All you have to do is sign those invites! (In other words: just provide a config file and you’re done).

More Information

You can check it out at the official PoolParty website. Tutorials, walk-throughs and articles are coming soon.

If you are interested in active development, check out the source at github. Active discussion is on the PoolParty Google Group

Here are the slides from the talk Ari gave at RailsConf sessions (also available here):

Some people use scaffolds, some people don’t. To those who do and happen to have their project taking advantage of Haml, probably understand the pain it is to go through all those lame rhtml files and convert them to Haml. Thus, a quick and dirty solution has arrived. Meet your master: “RSpec Haml Scaffolds”.

It’s hosted at github over here:
http://github.com/dfischer/rspec-haml-scaffold-generator

To install the git way (until Rails’ script/install supports git) do this in your rails_root/vendor/plugins directory:

git clone git://github.com/dfischer/rspec-haml-scaffold-generator.git

Bam, you’re done. You should have a rspec-haml-scaffold folder in your vendor/plugins directory and when you fire up the following command:

script/generate

You should see “rspec_haml_scaffold” in the “installed generators…plugins” section.

Remember this is a quick and dirty version of the plugin. There may be a couple quirks with it, if so feel free to fork the repository on github and submit a patch!

p.s If anyone needs a github invite I have three left. All you need to do is request one in the comments, be sure to leave a way to contact you.