There’s no place like Ruby for the Cloud

I’m getting the itch to dust off my ruby skills and get back into some software development in my spare time.  Mostly because I’ve been immersed in cloud computing technologies for the last 5 weeks and I’ve become aware of two technologies that will be help automate all that is cloud:  puppet and chef.  Both are written in the coolest language I’ve every worked with: ruby!  This exciting to me because I was a former ruby/rails developer and was kind of missing that type of work and now I’ve found an area of intersection for ruby with cloud computing.  Rock on!

So before getting started with some cloud app dev in ruby and/or puppet and chef, I needed to check out what is new in the ruby and RoR (ruby on rails) world.  I’ve probably missed quite a lot in the last 3 years since I was actively hacking out RoR apps.  Here are the tools and resources I’ve (re)discovered and will be starting with:

Launchpad Resources

• Ruby on Rails resource to resources –  http://rubyonrails.org/
• Ruby Language main page – http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

Infrastructure Automation (Cloud)

• Chef  - http://www.opscode.com/chef
• Puppet – http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/introduction.html

Editors

• VIM baby! I’m old school.  Vi-like editors are not for everyone, though.  But you can get VIM for linux, Windows and Mac.  I’m starting out with VIM on Ubuntu linux.  -  http://www.vim.org/index.php
• And there’s now a Ruby on Rails features for VIM –  http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1567
• Textmate is a Mac-only client. Probably most popular Ruby editor for Mac.  When I’m home (2 Macs), I might take Textmate for another testdrive, but not to excited about forked out cash for this endeavor….yet – http://macromates.com/
• More IDEs and editors at the bottom of this page might get my time: http://rubyonrails.org/download.  But for now I’m going old school.  If I can be more productive some other way, I’ll definitely give it a shot.

Deploying Rails Apps

Last time I was active in RoR dev, the preferred deployment method was changing every 9 months.  I was not disappointed to learn that there have been some big improvements in simplicity and speed for deploying Rails apps.  Here’s the latest:

• Phusion Passenger –  http://www.modrails.com/ – I’ll be starting here and will see if it truly is as simple as it states.  I’m hoping so.  As cool and easy as Ruby and Rails make development life, deployment and hosting has always been somewhat of a PITA.
  • If Passenger falls on its face, I’ll just fall back to what I know: Mongrel -> http://github.com/fauna/mongrel
• Don’t forget you can also use jRuby to run your RoR app on any Java Virtual Machine, and Warbler can be used to package any Rails app as a .war file for deployment to java app servers like VMware SpringSources lightweight tcServer .  This seems like a great way to “infect” your Java org with the goodness of Ruby on Rails AND VMware at the same time.
• Database layer I’ll probably default to MySQL since I have the most experience in this space.  But I’m very interested in exploring more scalable options and will also be looking to “NoSQL” options to address use cases that need web-scalability.

Well, that’s my starting point for this week.  Hopefully will have time for more posts on my journey back to ruby as time allows and I get some reps under my belt with some of the above mentioned items.  In the meantime, if you have questions about starting off with Ruby and Rails and cloud hosting and management of these types of apps.  I’ll be glad to share my experience since it will be very fresh in my mind.  Feel free to tweet me at @vSeanClark and I’ll be glad to point you in the right direction.