Advanced Deployment with Rails JAX 2009

Jonathan Weiss, 21 April 2009

Peritor GmbH

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Who am I?

Jonathan Weiss

•  Consultant for Peritor GmbH in Berlin

•  Specialized in Rails, Scaling, Deployment, and Code Review

•  Webistrano - Rails deployment tool

•  FreeBSD Rubygems and Ruby on Rails maintainer

http://www.peritor.com

http://blog.innerewut.de

http://twitter.com/jweiss

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Advanced Deployment

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Advanced Deployment

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Deployment

Process Architecture

Deployment

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Infrastructure Architecture

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Simple Rails Setup

One Rails instance handles all requests

Rails is (was) single-threaded: There is only one concurrent request

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Rails Setup

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Rails Setup

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Typical Rails Setup

•  A load-balancer distributes the incoming requests

•  Some load-balancers will deliver static requests themselves

•  Several Rails instances handle all requests

•  Number of concurrent requests equals number of Rails instances

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Rails Setup Options

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Deployment Questions

Mongrel?

Apache?

Ebb?

FastCGI?

mod_rails?

Thin?

Nginx?

Lighttpd?

Pound? mod_proxy_balancer?

HA-Proxy?

Phusion Passenger?

Load-balancer? Proxy?

Rails Application Server?

Swiftiply? Reverse Proxy?

Pen?

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The relevant ones

Rails Application Server

•  Mongrel

•  mod_rails / Phussion Passenger

•  JRuby + Glassfish & Co.

Proxy/Web Server

•  Apache2

•  Nginx

•  HA-Proxy

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Mongrel

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Mongrel

•  Complete HTTP-Server that can load arbitrary Ruby-servlets

•  Built-in Rails support

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Mongrel

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Mongrel

Apache 2.2 – mod_proxy_balancer Lighttpd Nginx HA-Proxy Pound

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Mongrel Cluster

Utility to manage several Mongrel instances

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Mongrel Cluster

Control Mongrels

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Mongrel

•  Very robust

•  Strict HTTP parser

•  Easy to debug (HTTP!)

•  Defacto standard deployment with Apache 2.2 and mod_proxy_balancer

•  Can be a bit difficult to setup (mongrel_cluster, ports, Apache)

•  Not so easy on mass/virtual hosting

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mod_rails

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mod_rails a.k.a Phusion Passenger

•  Module for Apache 2.2 (and Nginx)

•  Allows Apache to control Rails instances

•  Apache starts and stops application instances depending on the application load

•  Able to run any RACK-compatible Ruby application (Merb & Co.)

•  Only manages Rails on one host - no remote instances

•  Combine with HTTP-Proxy / balancing solution

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Install Phusion Passenger

Install module

Load and activate in Apache

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Control Phusion Passenger

Restart after deployment:

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Phusion Passenger

One machine

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Phusion Passenger

One machine Multiple machines

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Phusion Passenger

•  Fairly new but ready for production

•  Makes setup easier – on the single machine level

•  Multiple servers still require load balancer

•  Suitable for mass-hosting

•  (upcoming) standard way of deploying Rails

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JRuby

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•  Ruby Runtime on the Java Virtual Machine

•  Implemented in Java and Ruby

•  Compiles Ruby into Java-bytecode

•  Integrates with Java code and libraries

•  Java’s promises of native threads and JIT

•  Allows for Ruby/Rails applications to be packaged as WAR files

•  WAR files deployable on any J2EE-container: Glassfish, JBoss, Tomcat, Jetty, …

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JRuby on Rails

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JRuby on Glassfish

One machine

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JRuby on Glassfish

One machine Multiple machines

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Setup JRuby on Glassfish

1.  Download JRuby and Glassfish

2.  From http://blog.headius.com/2008/08/zero-to-production-in-15-minutes.html

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Warble Configuration

Define min/max Rails runtimes

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Infrastructure Process

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Deployment Process Requirements

Automatic Reproducible Accountable Notifications

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Deployment Options

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Deployment Options

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Deployment Options

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Deployment Options

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What does Capistrano do?

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Capistrano Deployment Cycle

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The Deployment Lifecycle

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Requirements

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Get Your Capistrano On

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Get Your Capistrano On

config/deploy.rb

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Capistrano

Your one-stop deployment shop

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Capistrano Tasks

To find all the tasks available in your project, use

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Custom Tasks

Override build-in

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Write your own Tasks

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Write your own Tasks

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The Rest

•  Callbacks

•  Transactions

•  Capistrano Shell

•  Custom tasks and namespaces

•  Staging and multiple setups

•  Gem dependencies

•  Support for deploying through gateway servers

•  Server setup with deprec gem

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One Click Deploy

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Webistrano

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Webistrano

•  Web-UI to Capistrano

•  Manages projects and their stages

•  Alerting and Accounting

•  Scriptable and extendable

•  BSD License

http://labs.peritor.com/webistrano

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Macistrano

•  Mac-GUI to Webistrano

•  Fire and monitor deployments from your desktop

http://github.com/mattmatt/macistrano

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Cloud Infrastructure

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Cloud Infrastructure

Servers come and go

•  You do not know your servers before deploying

•  Restarting is the same as introducing a new machine

You can’t hardcode IPs

database.yml

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Solution #1

Query and manually adjust

•  Servers do not change that often

•  New nodes probably need manual intervention

•  Use AWS ElasticIPs to ease the pain

Set servers dynamically AWS Elastic IP

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Solution #2

Use a central directory service

•  A central place to manage your running instances

•  Instances query the directory and react

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Solution #2

Use a central directory service

•  A central place to manage your running instances

•  Instances query the directory and react

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Central Directory

Different Implementations

•  File on S3

•  SimpleDB

•  A complete service, capable of monitoring and controlling your instances

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Final words

Once understood the Rails infrastructure is quite simple

Passenger is very easy to setup and should be the default choice

Learn how to use Capistrano and Webistrano, they will make your life much easier – even in non-Rails setups

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Questions?

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Peritor GmbH

Teutonenstraße 16 14129 Berlin

Telefon: +49 (0)30 69 20 09 84 0 Telefax: +49 (0)30 69 20 09 84 9

Internet: www.peritor.com E-Mail: kontakt@peritor.com

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