Life is grand

And into Jason Hoffman’s talk on systems administration and Rails. Deployment, hosting, power, databases etc.

Strongspace, a Rails app from Joyent, is at 60terabytes. Joyent does TextDrive remember so they know some things. BTW Jason is from Joyent.

Rails is just a small part of your entire system. You need a lot more than just a sorted Rails config to have a well served app.

Virtualisation is the real only way. Xen, VMWare (if you must) or Solaris Zones.

Jason is not enamoured with Linux; “If I could turn Linux into a clever way of saying ‘crashes everyday and doesn’t tell you why’, I would.”

WordPress, half a million users, uses DNS load balancing. Works pretty well.

Joyent chooses:
- Console is Lantronix
- Sun Fire AMD servers, T1000, X4100 etc.
- Opteron 285 and TI SPARC
- 2GB RAM
- Sen Fire X5400 storage
- 500GB SATA discs
- Solaris Nevada OS
- Gigabit with cat6 cables

DTrace is getting Ruby integration so you can write performance tests to find out what exactly is going wrong. DTrace is from Solaris and also ported to Mac OS X in Leopard via XRay in XCode.

Key concepts:
- virtualise
- seperate hardware comp. (db from procesing from storage)
- KISS
- stoichiometry (from chemistry, the practice of adding up. If you can’t just add on another server then you have problems.)
- config management and distributed control
- pool and split i.e. SOA
- Understand what is maximum to understand what should be happening vs. what is (potential)

I’ve asked Jason for the slides to this talk and will post them later.

Excellent talk from Jason.
- DNS and federation