Scaling Rails Applications in the Cloud

The hashtag for this talk is: #SX09-573

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The

Inev

itabl

e M

ass A

dopt

ion

of O

ur P

rodu

ct

The Inexorable March of Time

Me, Josh, and a

few other people

Friends & Family

Private Beta

Public Beta

Techcrunch50

A Typical Case Study

4

8

32

I’m Mike Subelsky@subelsky / @otherinbox

What is Cloud Computing?

Solving problems across a flexible grid

of nodes

...which you consume as a utility

The nodes areelastic

The nodes areloosely coupled

Permanent Storage

Computing

Instance

Computing

Instance

Computing

Instance

Computing

Instance

Tasking System

The nodes aredistributed

The nodes areephemeral

The nodes aredisposable

What are the benefits?

Lower costGreater efficiencyGreater flexibility

You want flexibility

Hea

dy, V

iral

, Asy

mpt

omto

tic G

row

th o

f Use

rbas

e

The Blink of an Eye

Me, Josh, and a

few other people

Friends & Family

Private Beta

Public Beta

Techcrunch50

My Cloud Grows With Me!

4

8

32

What are the costs?

Some loss of controlPotential for lock-inGreater complexity

You chose a languagethat sublimates

complexity

Ruby Shines Here

RightAWS

aws-S3

ActiveSupport

Hpricot

Ruby/EventMachine

memcache-client

CapistranoChef

RubberPoolParty

ScalrRoll Your Own

What do you needto get started?

Permanent Storage

Computing

Instance

Computing

Instance

Computing

Instance

Computing

Instance

Tasking System

Bonus: Non-RDBMS

Our SkySMTP Sync

WebWorkers

StagingStaging

StagingStaging

StagingStaging

StagingStaging

StagingStaging

StagingExperiment

Master DBProcessing

Web Cloud

Apache HAProxy

Mongrels & Memcached

Mongrels & Memcached

Mongrels & Memcached

Master DB

JSON

HTML

Atom

S3

Message Bodies

SQS

Mailbox Export Requests,Domain Registration

Staging & Experiments

Sync Cloud

Autoscaling

SMTP Cloud

MailSenderPostfix

S3

MailParserMailReceiver

SQS

S3 File

name to

Parse

Raw Mbox File

Tasking

Raw

Mbo

x Fi

le

Master DB

MailSenderPostfix

S3

MailParserMailReceiver

SQS

S3 File

name to

Parse

Raw Mbox File

Tasking

Raw

Mbo

x Fi

le

Master DB

MailSenderPostfix

S3

MailParserMailReceiver

SQS

S3 File

name to

Parse

Raw Mbox File

Tasking

Raw

Mbo

x Fi

le

Master DB

US-EAST-1C

US-EAST-1B

Loose Coupling Is How I Sleep At Night

MailSenderPostfix

S3

MailParserMailReceiver

SQS

S3 File

name to

Parse

Raw Mbox File

Tasking

Raw

Mbo

x Fi

le

Master DB

MailSenderPostfix

S3

MailParserMailReceiver

SQS

S3 File

name to

Parse

Raw Mbox File

Tasking

Raw

Mbo

x Fi

le

Master DB

US-EAST-1C

US-EAST-1B

X XX

Loose Coupling Is How I Sleep At Night

MailSenderPostfix

S3

MailParserMailReceiver

SQS

S3 File

name to

Parse

Raw Mbox File

Tasking

Raw

Mbo

x Fi

le

Master DB

MailSenderPostfix

S3

MailParserMailReceiver

SQS

S3 File

name to

Parse

Raw Mbox File

Tasking

Raw

Mbo

x Fi

le

Master DB

US-EAST-1C

US-EAST-1B

XX

Loose Coupling Is How I Sleep At Night

MailSenderPostfix

S3

MailParserMailReceiver

SQS

S3 File

name to

Parse

Raw Mbox File

Tasking

Raw

Mbo

x Fi

le

Master DB

MailSenderPostfix

S3

MailParserMailReceiver

SQS

S3 File

name to

Parse

Raw Mbox File

Tasking

Raw

Mbo

x Fi

le

Master DB

US-EAST-1C

US-EAST-1B

XX

Loose Coupling Is How I Sleep At Night

MailSenderPostfix

S3

MailParserMailReceiver

SQS

S3 File

name to

Parse

Raw Mbox File

Tasking

Raw

Mbo

x Fi

le

Master DB

MailSenderPostfix

S3

MailParserMailReceiver

SQS

S3 File

name to

Parse

Raw Mbox File

Tasking

Raw

Mbo

x Fi

le

Master DB

US-EAST-1C

US-EAST-1B

XX

Loose Coupling Is How I Sleep At Night

Loose Coupling Is How I Sleep At Night

What It Looks Like

Processing Cloud

Message Created

MessageParsing QueueMessageClassfier Queue

AnyFeatureWeWant Queue

ActiveRecord callb

acks push

S3 filename

MessageParser

MessageClassifier

AnyFeatureWorker

Tasks

• MessageExporter

• DailyUpdateSender

• RegistrationWorker

• BackupWorker

Workers

The Database Is aSingle Point of

Failure

Master DB

EBS VolumeHourly

Snapshots

WeeklyDumps

Expensive Queries Memcached

How We Cope

A Dark ButIllustrative Talewith QuickTime

Manual Stuff

mkdir /volmount /vol /dev/sdj

sudo god start mysqld

Manual Stuff

change database.yml by hand (yuck)

queue mail to redeliver

(Wasted)Troubleshooting:

15 mins

Provisioning new database:

15 mins

If there was a next time...

< 10 minutes

(standard programmeroptimism applies)

Replication? Sharding?

Key-Value?Columns?

Logging

Logging gem

Good ol’ fashion tail

Splunk

Monitoring

Hoptoad

New RelicAlertra

Dash

Zenoss

RightScale

Slow query log

Questions?mike@oib.com

@subelsky@otherinbox

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