Brainspl.at: EngineYard Technology Stack

"EngineYard Technology Stack" by we live togehte

Mon, 07 May 2007 13:00:24 +0000

Predicted values in template editing can be done through any PHP script?

"EngineYard Technology Stack" by Bang Bros

Thu, 03 May 2007 09:07:11 +0000

Newbie here but not newbie to the article, nice work!

"EngineYard Technology Stack" by mxcreep

Sat, 24 Mar 2007 21:53:22 +0000

@Luis Lavena : I guess you never used a SAN before...When you use a clustered SAN your speeds are way above local raid sets. And it's so easy to migrate VM's. We use management software that watches all VM's with heartbeat. When single VM's die the system will reboot them and bring back online. When a hardware node fails all VM's on it will be migrated to a spare node immediately and they continue to run. Storage on a SAN is also much easier to maintain...all storage is managed in one tool. You have the benefits of snapshots and you can pu t a clustered filesystem upon it and give more than one VM access for a loadbalanced environment for example. And for the speed thing...I've seen single units providing over 700Mb/s iSCSI througput....imagine what it can do when clustered and using loadbalanced multi path io.

"EngineYard Technology Stack" by EDI

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 15:53:19 +0000

The PR team would no doubt love to hear about your deployment

"EngineYard Technology Stack" by Jason

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 10:42:33 +0000

I'm very interested in signing up! Can you let me know when this service is ready to go? I'd love to port all my rails apps to a more reliable server. Dreamhost just isn't cutting it for me. Lately I've been working with our sysadmin to get Apache w/ mod_proxy_load_balancer load balancing mongrel clusters while also allowing Tomkat 5.0.28 to work with our Java stack. Very interesting project. Anyways, great site I'll be viewing it regularly.

"EngineYard Technology Stack" by Luis Lavena

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 02:48:05 +0000

Hi Ezra, Quite impressive the yard setup :-) Start my weekend lecture with Xen architecture and is evry interesting. We use a flash too to pre-boot our windows systems (and upgrade using a image from a network server). How the domU gentoo know which slice should it load? (hehe, thats the trick, right?) Anyway, looked at Coraid, but will stick to Areca (local RAID, we need high IO and too-much-to-count MB/s for video). Good weekend!

"EngineYard Technology Stack" by Ezra

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 21:23:50 +0000

@Ian-

Yeah Gentoo ended up being the perfect distro to build our infrastructure on top of. It is by far the most cust6omizable and tuneable linux I have come across. We have built our own Engintoo distro ;) Its is super small and totally optimized for serving rails applications. We love Gentoo so once we are a bit further along we will contact the pr team at gentoo and give them a run down. Thaks for everyones interest. I'm super excited about engine yard.

"EngineYard Technology Stack" by Ezra

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 21:20:35 +0000

Each slice will scale dynamically up to a certain point. After that point you add more slices to scale farther. We are still working out the exact details of slice resource allocation and will announce when we have a better idea. But we plan on making each slice capable of quite a bit of traffic. Its a different way of looking at rails hosting so we are treading new ground here. As we work out more and more details we will let everyone know more about the service and what to expect from each individual slice.

"EngineYard Technology Stack" by Marston

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 21:14:52 +0000

Quick question: Since the "slices" are basically VPS images with the filesystem mounted from the SAN, how are you provisioning the resources for each "slice"? Particularly CPU and RAM resources. (Also HD space?) Are static values set for each slice and clients buy more slices to get more resources or is it on some kind of dynamic scale depending on how much is going on within each slice?

"EngineYard Technology Stack" by Marston

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 12:05:55 +0000

"EngineYard is kinda like a mini EC2 built only for rails ;)" I'd say so. Man this is totally awesome, great work!

"EngineYard Technology Stack" by ian

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 10:47:06 +0000

A root slice sounds perfect. I'm an ex-Gentoo developer by the way, I'm glad to see it being used here! The PR team would no doubt love to hear about your deployment (you'd get a bit of free advertising via the GWN too ;)). I'll give you guys another look in a couple of months.

"EngineYard Technology Stack" by Jay Jansheski

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 23:46:29 +0000

Mmmmm. When do we get to buy?

"EngineYard Technology Stack" by Ezra

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 23:27:23 +0000

Hey Ian-

You are correct the managed slices you don't get ssh access. But you do get a rake terminal where you can run any rake tasks you have written.

Of course people will have specific requirements that don't match the managed slices sometimes. So we will also be offering root slices. These are in the same cluster and setup the same way but you do get shell access to install any custom daemons or what have you. So these are unmanged slices that you can do whatever you need with and still utilize the cluster resources and tie them in with your managed app slices. We already have some clients that need custom daemons and so a root slice or two as part of your managed environment will give you the flexibility thast you want. We can also setup entirely dedicated custom clusters to your specs with whatever you need installed. Including a branded version of our control panel ;)

We aren't out of beta yet so we are being a bit vague on some details. This is mainly because we are still tuning and benchmarking and working out these issues. Rest assured we are going to make this one of the most kick ass rails hosts around. So if you have any concerns we are happy to address them with you. ez@engineyard.com

"EngineYard Technology Stack" by ian

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 23:02:03 +0000

So can people get SSH access to their VPS? If so, in theory people could quite easily have a development and production environments in once slice, right? Can you choose the number of mongrels you have running in your slice or is it a one mongel per slice setup? My site (which goes live in a few months) uses a custom cache server for general persistent object storage, how would something like this become redundant on your cluster? Looks like an interesting service, and I like the idea of being able to scale easily without having to move host, but SSH access is a deal breaker for me. "What you get" isn't very clear at this point.

EngineYard Technology Stack

ezmobius — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 19:06:00 +0000

People have been asking me for a little technology overview of how Engine Yard is structured. I’ll give a small run down here.