aidanf.net

I went to the Ruby Ireland meetup in Dublin last night (I had to deliver some books). I left Galway at 3:30pm and got back at 1:30am. That’s a long way to go to talk about ruby but it was fun. It was great to meet up with people I hadn’t seen for a while again and meet some of the others that I only know from online. Still I didn’t get to talk to a lot of the people there - hopefully I’ll make it down to some more in the next few months.

John Ward gave a really interesting talk about deploying rails on Amazon EC2. EC2 basically gives you access to a cluster of virtual machines and you get charged by the hour when you have them running. You can spawn new VMs as and when you need them. One interesting use of this that was mentioned it the ability have your own server hosting your rails app but using EC2 to deal with traffic spikes by dynamically spawning EC2 instances to handle the extra traffic. Amazon S3 was also discussed. It offers cheap reliable online storage. I’m going to look into using it as a place to automatically backup all my databases and servers. Johns slides are available online here.