The conference season is starting again for me and I wanted to note where I will be/speak during the next couple of weeks.
First, there is Ruby Fools Copenhagen (April 1st and 2nd) where I will speak in the Ruby Performance track about Rails on AWS and how to leverage EC2, S3, and SQS in your application. The lineup at Ruby Fools looks really good with speakers like Glenn Vanderburg, Michael Koziarski, Evan Phoenix, Dr. Nic Williams, Dave Thomas, and Matz himself. Unfortunately I will not have too much time in Copenhagen as I have to leave early for Scotland on Rails in Edinburgh.
I'm really looking forward to be in Edinburgh again. After living, studying, and working there it feels like a second home. At Scotland on Rails (April 4th and 5th) I will talk about Rails Patterns: typical problems and scenarios in Rails applications like asynchronous operations (image processing, calculations, ..), authentication or deployment and common solutions and best practices.
In Mai I will be at Linuxtag 2008 in Berlin and hopefully talk about Ruby on Rails Security, but this talk has not been confirmed yet. Further, there is a chance that I will be speaking a the iX Cebit Forum 2008 about our internal Software Development Process and Agile Development.
I'm just back from today's Web 2.0 Expo sessions and I'm not sure I will attend tomorrow. Many have written about this before, but the creative, social atmosphere is missing due to the conference labyrinth halls. Boy, I'm happy I haven't spend > 1.000 Euros on this. No real food, a lot of product presentations, not enough room for socializing and to many suits for my taste.
Still, I had some nice conversations and met some interesting people.
I did again a session on scaling with Amazon EC2 and S3, the slides can be found here.
Amazon EC2 gets two new types of instances, large and extra large EC2 instances. Basically a large instance that has 4 times the capacity (CPU, RAM, HDD) of the old, now default small instance type while the extra large instance type has 8 times the capacity.
Small Instance (default)
1.7 GB memory
1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit)
160 GB instance storage (150 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
32-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
Price: $0.10 per instance hour
Large Instance
7.5 GB memory
4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
850 GB instance storage (2 x 420 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
Price: $0.40 per instance hour
Extra Large Instance
15 GB memory
8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
1,690 GB instance storage (4 x 420 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
Price: $0.80 per instance hour
The idea is that you specify the instance type in the RunInstances API call. All old tools that do not specify this parameter start a default instance type.
Very nice to see this so fast after the recent S3 SLAs.
If they would now allow to run EC2 instances in Europe there are no excuses left not to run nearly all applications on EC2.
Basically, we commit to 99.9% uptime, measured on a monthly basis. If an S3 call fails (by returning a ServiceUnavailable or InternalError result) this counts against the uptime. If the resulting uptime is less than 99%, you can apply for a service credit of 25% of your total S3 charges for the month. If the uptime is 99% but less than 99.9%, you can apply for a service credit of 10% of your S3 charges.
Very nice to see this shortly after the AWS presentation by Jeff Barr at the Berlin Ruby User Group. But I guess that for many people in big corporate settings this is not enough. But still, it's a start. And it makes selling AWS S3 as part of our solutions easier.
Rails Konferenz 2007 is over and like last year it was a lot of fun, meeting other developers and learning some new stuff.
My talk on scaling Rails applications with Amazon S3 and EC2 went well and I had some interesting discussions afterwards. The talk was based on my Linuxtag talk but had a lot more info on Switiply and load-balancing.
We use the ECS API to let professors and students search for books and study guides on Amazon and then recommend the books to other students. So besides rating a course a student can also recommend supporting literature to others. This is the first step in our plans to increase MeinProfs value to students. We introduced this feature only a short while ago but already have many professors who register and recommend books to their students through our system.
The implementation uses the amazon-ecs ruby library that internally uses Hpricot, the great HTML/XML parser by _why.
The basic usage looks like this:
require 'amazon/ecs'
Amazon::Ecs.options = {
:aWS_access_key_id => SECRET_KEY,
:associate_tag => ASSOCIATE_TAG,
:response_group => 'Medium',
:country => :de
}
result_set = Amazon::Ecs.item_search('Programming Ruby', {
:search_index => 'Books' # use Blended if you want also foreign books (usefull in DE and FR)
})
if result_set.has_errors?
raise "Problem with ECS!"
end
result_set.items.each do |item|
puts item.get('title')
puts item.get('asin')
puts item.get('detailpageurl')
end
The difficult part is filtering and pre-processing the search term entered by the user in order to reduce the result set.
I will present a more Rails centric variant of this talk at the upcoming Rails Konferenz in Frankfurt, Germany. Further I will be talking about S3/EC2 and Rails at the RailsConfEurope 2007 here in Berlin, Germany.
I'm Jonathan Weiss, a partner at Peritor in Berlin, Germany.
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