Presented by Mike Subelsky - Other Inbox – mikesubelsky@otherinbox.com
For starters, this dude is dressed in a goddamn super hero outfit! Great start, great first impression. I saw him earlier this morning before the JavaScript panel presentation, and got pretty excited about it—but I just thought that he was some random conference nutter. On top of that, he’s walking around just introducing himself to the folks up in the front row. Awesome.
Dude is from Other Inbox, which I guess “handles email overload”—he said that he’s not here to sell the product, so he’s not really talking about it much. They just launched and had 100 new users in less than two hours. They have a cloud computing setup—5 server arrays (32 servers)—that can expand as needed (they use Amazon EC2 services). They moved “into the cloud”
Cloud computing is basically solving problems across a flexible grid of nodes. The nodes are elastic, and “loosely coupled” (in cloud computing, no server has a dependency on another server). Nodes are also distributed across different regions, to avoid one array getting bogged down and then that affecting another array. Nodes are also disposable—you can shut down a node whenever you desire.
Being relatively new to Ruby and Rails—and relatively ignorant of cloud computing—this session is already way over my head, but I’ll continue on for the benefit of others and possibly my future self.
Apparently, these are the best benefits of cloud computing:
- Lower cost
- Greater efficiency
- Greater flexibility—your system will grow with you, and you don’t pay for things that you are not using. You can launch new servers with ease, which is great for testing.
And these are its costs:
- Some loss of control
- Potential for lock-in (difficult to move to another provider)
- Greater complexity
Ruby gems that make dealing with cloud computing easier:
- RightAWS
- memcache-client
- aws-S3
- Hpricot
- Ruby/EventMachine (for multiple parallel requests)
- ActiveSupport
My brain is overloading as super hero man talks about the intimate details of servers in cloud computing (daemons, mongrels, memcaching, proxies, etc). Kind of wish I had sat closer to the door now so that I could slip out undetected and ninja myself into Khoi Vinh’s presentation next door…
Actually, eff this, I’m going to bounce—can’t hang with it anymore because it is basically just a tour of the back end of Other Inbox and I don’t think this is really going to be helpful to me—or very many people in general—at any point. Dude’s costume is still pretty sweet though.
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