Scaling to Enterprise
It’s time to let the proverbial cat out out of the bag (meow!). Over the past several months, I’ve been working on a book for O’Reilly Media called Scaling to Enterprise with Ruby on Rails.
This book teaches you how to think like a architect and therefore it picks up where other Rails books leave off. What do I mean by that?
Most books out there teach you how to use tools: Ruby the language, Rails the framework, or Rails plug-in xyz. These books are great if you’re reading them purely to learn syntax. Syntax is one thing; how you put everything together to make a site scale to millions of users is quite another thing altogether.
Also, this book is not focused exclusively on Ruby/Rails. There’s a lot of theory in building enterprise web sites that doesn’t map directly into Ruby statements. Examples of such topics are schema design, different caching techniques and when each is appropriate, and service oriented architecture. These are all questions of web architecture, and the concepts are true independent of the language or framework choice. In the end (and in the book), the theory does translate into Rails code, but a lot of time is devoted to exploring the theories themselve. Armed with the why in addition to the what, you can make intelligent design decisions in your own projects.
The topics in this book will not be new to seasoned web software architects. However, there’s a new spin on old tried and true ideas, as the ideas will finally make their way into the Rails community discussion. This is a book for beginners (who have at least read the Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development With Rails books), intermediate, and advanced Rails users alike. I’m looking forward to feedback, especially once we start posting Rough Cuts online.
Hi Dan,
With regard to your upcoming book, I’d like to ask if it will include details on deploying your rails app to Amazon EC2 and storing things like photos, videos on Amazon S3?
Also, when exactly will it be released?
Rails developers around the world are looking for a book that goes in-depth into utilizing the Amazon web services. Look forward to hearing from you.
S.F.
Will your book be covering amazon s3 and ec2?
Hi SF,
The book, now called “Enterprise Rails,” is theory-based, like a textbook, as opposed to being a manual for individual products out there. The ideas are universal, so you can apply the techniques to any project anywhere, even if they are not Rails based. So a question like “How do I make intelligent use of 100 servers?” will be answered, but “How do I set up 100 servers on EC2″ will not.
Amazon’s SimpleDB will get coverage though. Again, not “how” to use it, but why and when and for what you would use it.
It’s actually a core thesis of the book that having 100 or 1000 servers doesn’t help you scale if you don’t know what to do with them. I assume that intelligent folks out there can figure out how to use EC2 to get their 100 machines, but the theory of how to utilize that power to scale rather than fail is the same whether you’re on EC2 or in a colo.