More info on Vertebra

Posted by ezmobius Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:52:00 GMT

I gave a talk on Vertebra today at Pivotal Labs. This time it was a bit more technical then my last talk at railsconf as the system has evolved since then. We’re working furiously on this thing and hope to have the first release very soon.

We will be opening up an early beta for a few folks so if you have some wicked cool idea you want to use Vertebra for get in touch and a few people can get added to the early access.

Video was taken today of the talk and should get posted online within a few weeks.

Slides are on slideshare here if you cannot view the embedded version below.

Vertebra

Tags , , ,  | 5 comments

Nginx Upload Module

Posted by ezmobius Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:32:00 GMT

Valery Kholodkov has written a very cool nginx module for handling uploads.

The way this works is that you specify a location block to handle the uploads. So if you are using the standard nginx.conf for rails apps then you would add this in your server block right above your “location /” block:

    # Upload form should be submitted to this location
    location /upload {
      # Pass altered request body to this location
      upload_pass   /internalupload;

      # Store files to this location
      upload_store /tmp;

      # Set specified fields in request body
      upload_set_form_field $upload_field_name.name "$upload_file_name";
      upload_set_form_field $upload_field_name.content_type "$upload_content_type";
      upload_set_form_field $upload_field_name.path "$upload_tmp_path";
    }

    # Pass altered request body to a proxy
    location /internalupload {
        proxy_pass   http://mongrel;
    }

Then make a simple upload form that does a multipart POST to /upload. Now you can have your Rails or Merb app on the backend with a route called /upload. In the action of your app that responds to the /upload route you will get a set of params that look like this(assume the name of your upload fields is called ‘file1’ and ‘file2’):

{"file2.path"=>"/tmp/0000123459", "file1.path"=>"/tmp/0000123458",
"file2.content_type"=>"image/png",  "submit"=>"Upload",
 "file2.name"=>"Picture 2.png", "action"=>"index", 
"file1.name"=>"Picture 1.png",  "controller"=>"test", 
"file1.content_type"=>"image/png", "test"=>"value"}

What this is doing if parsing the multi-part mime boundaries in C in the nginx plugin, putting the parsed files into files in /tmp and then stipping the multipart stuff out of the POST body and replacing it with the info you need to get the name and location of the file on disk.

This means that by the time the request hits your application, the expensive mime parsing is already done and you simply move the file to it’s final resting place. This is a huge win since now the hard work is done in C in nginx before your app ever gets involved.

Of course this is a fresh new module so do your own testing and deciding whether or not this is a fit for your needs. But I think this is a great plugin and have verified it works as advertised.

Tags ,  | 10 comments

Engine Yard takes $15mill Series B Round from NEA, Amazon and Benchmark

Posted by ezmobius Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:17:00 GMT

Man it seems like yesterday that Engine Yard was a small 3 person startup with big ideas and little cash. People seemed to like what we were offering and the business grew into a thriving startup.

In the beginning we only had plans to be the best fully managed rails/ruby hosting company. And I think we met this goal early on. But it became apparent that we had a strong brand and we started kicking around ideas of becoming an open source software company as well.

We believe in Ruby as a platform, and we’ve put our money where our mouth is when we sponsored Rubinius and Merb, hiring many developers to work on both projects.

Engine Yard has become much more then just a managed rails hosting company, we want to strengthen the Ruby ecosystem for everyone by providing the infrastructure and open source software for the next wave of Ruby deployments in the cloud.

We’ve also been delving into the cloud computing arena as I think the next 5 years are going to see huge transition from standard hosting models into the cloud. Our upcoming Vertebra project is a new application programming platform for building distributed cloud applications with XMPP. You can expect to see the first open source release of Vertebra this summer, I think this is a truly unique and very fun project to work on. I think a lot of folks out there will have tons of different use cases for it.

So fast forward to right now, Engine Yard now has more then 80 employees worldwide. Half of these people are Application Support and SysAdmins working to support all the awesome applications we host. Providing 24/7 support. But we also have a growing Engineering team working on all kinds of exciting stuff. I consider myself lucky to work with such a talented team.

So with all that being said, I’m excited to annouce that we have just closed our Series B round of VC funding totalling $15million dollars(insert austin powers joke here)! This round includes investment from NEA, Amazon and Benchmark.

We’re going to use this money towards making Ruby the platform of choice for cloud computing and web development in startups and the enterprise alike.

Watch this space, we have lots of exciting announcements in the coming months. I’d like to thank all of our customers and users of our open source software and the Ruby community in general. It has been a wild ride these last 2 years and I expect many more exciting things to come!

Tags  | 31 comments