Who's using Ruby on Rails?

If you are an Amazon EC2 or Amazon S3 aficionado and are using Ruby on Rails, we would like to hear from you. Particularly we are interested to know how you are using Ruby on Rails, your architecture, your EC2 network topology setup, your S3 hacks. Anything that can help the newcomers to ramp up fast. Ruby on Rails cuts the development time by 50%, AWS eliminates the headache by 70%, and your ideas/experience will help the new comers even more. We would love to know how you are using Amazon Web Services and Rails together. Please use the comments section to describe your product and how the Ruby on Rails framework has helped you to reach your goals.

We know about a few that are already using AWS/Ruby on Rails : RightCart, RightScale, 37Signals' BaseCamp, SlideShare, WeoGeo. In fact, Slideshare's Jon Boutelle has a cool presentation about Ruby/Amazon S3 architecture.

In my previous post, I listed various Ruby libraries that have been built to use AWS. If you have new ones or have a new version, let me know and I will add one more precious stone (ruby) in the already-shiny AWS throne. Few that caught my eye were:

• Capazon - a cool capistrano extension to manage Amazon EC2 instances
• CLI to Amazon S3 Service using Ruby - an interesting Command-Line Interface to Amazon S3 in Ruby

-- Jinesh

Comments

[Peat]

We use S3 heavily with our e-commerce sites, for wrangling big chunks of media (high res photos, videos, etc.) that would otherwise be a storage and bandwidth liability for us.

By using Ruby on Rails and S3, we've saved heaps of time and money on development, administration, and infrastructure: It took less than a day to build and test our system. Great stuff.

[Shane Sherman]

I made http://www.programmingbooks.org using Ruby on Rails last December in about 3 weeks. It basically allows programmers to rank their top 5 favorite programming books based on "subject". I use amazon ecs2 to allow easy importing of programming books data. I wrote my own set of amazon wrapper classes that pull the data from amazon. The next release which I'm almost done with is more tightly integrated with amazon and displays all sorts of specific data like Sales Rank, editorial reviews, customer reviews, related books, etc.

[Ara]

We here at Postful ( http://www.postful.com ) have been using AWS since Day 0. We designed our system around AWS prior to getting into beta. Soon after planning began, we decided to switch from Java to Rails, but we were still missing a few pieces from the Java enterprise stack.

When we first sketched out our architecture design, we were thinking about J2EE components. Then, we heard about AWS. We had already swapped out the Java web application frameworks, because of Rails. And AWS helped us swap out the rest of our backend enterprise architecture.

We employ a combination of SQS, S3, and EC2. We use SQS as an alternative to the Java Messaging Service. We really couldn't be happier with how this has worked out for us. SQS allows us to scale up our backend processing with a distributed server farm. SQS has cut our hardware costs, shortened our development time, and improved our reliability. I just can't say enough about how much more pleasant it was to work with a Ruby gem rather than installing our own messaging server. The open source Ruby AWS libraries were all the documentation we needed.

We use S3 as an alternative to having an in-house filesystem. We sign URLs and send our users there to retrieve their documents. S3 is a case where Amazon has assumed our fixed initial costs for us and lowered our development time. Doing everything we could to minimize our development time and get out of the blocks quickly was a priority for us.

It's rare for the same product to be easy enough to use to be a rapid prototyping tool and yet scalable enough to meet your infrastructure needs down the road. Whatever we might need to implement later on, we know we can always start with AWS, because it is quite simply the most agile way to create an enterprise architecture.

With AWS, Rails, and RESTful Web services, we really have a full enterprise stack that does most of the things that we would have needed from J2EE. We really feel like this kind of architecture-as-a-service is going to be the future of enterprise software.

[Jinesh]

These are awesome applications. Please let us know if you would like us to talk about it at RailsConf.

Jin

[Kirill Sheynkman]

I built an advanced Real Estate Analysis site about a year ago to get some Ruby/Rails experience (http://www.housemath.us) just for fun. It is Rails/MySQL/and YUI. The stite was running on a machine I had attached to a T1 at home and started to become popular. I recently moved the entire thing to EC2 and all the content (javascript, css, etc.) to S3. Works like a charm. Runs fast. The whole dev/test/production process is infinitely easier.

[Christian Brousseau]

We were able to develop http://www.gamesuggestr.com in less than two months using Ruby on rails and Amazon ECS.

GameSuggestR does exactly what the name says in three easy steps.

Phase 1 - Rate the games you have.
In order to suggest games you like, it is important to know which games you like. (Or don't like)

Phase 2 - ?

Phase 3 - Get game suggestions according to your tastes.
If you like a particular game, surely there is someone else out there that likes it as much as you. Well, what other games is he playing? That might interest you…

GameSuggestR uses the Amazon.com product catalog as its primary data source. This comes with a lot of advantages, since the catalog is updated daily; you're always presented with the latest information.

Let's be honest, there wouldn't be any GameSuggestR if it weren’t for Amazon ECS.