Goplan goes AWS

Goplan - An online collaboration and project management tool - is a full fledged Ruby on Rails Application that is based on Amazon EC2 for hosting and Amazon S3 for storage. It took me less than 1 minute to get started with the app. No ugly big forms to fill out nor answer any difficult security questions like "What is your great grandfather's middle name?" The best part is signup form has 4 simple fields to fill.

Felix interviewed Goplan's developer. This blog post certainly shares some interesting insights into Goplan.org and Amazon EC2/S3.

He notes:

Tiago: The switch to EC2 came when we needed to scale the application. Not only was it cheaper to run it on EC2, it was also easier to scale during the launch. The ability to launch more instances on demand was very useful when we were featured on TechCrunch, digg, etc. Using S3 was a natural consequence of our move to EC2.

Most interesting part of the blogpost was the knowledge and experience the developer shares. Things like which S3 ruby library was used, WAL approach to data loss within PostGreSQL database, Munin to monitor the DB instances in case of failover and the best part on how a database can scale on EC2:

several ways: by changing that behaviour for read-only queries (it wouldn’t even be a day’s worth of work), by using a middleware solution (such as SQL Relay) or by addressing that at the database level (using Master-Master replication). MySQL has internal replication solutions, PostgreSQL has PGCluster (I have some experience using it) and there is always the option of using more complex (and expensive) solutions such as Oracle databases.

This shows how smart programmers are finding cool and nifty ways to architect applications and move on to solve more interesting problems.

-- Jinesh

update: Felix is the author of blog/interview