Rails Industry News for February 2009
Welcome to the latest in our new series - Rails Industry News - where we focus on the latest from companies that either depend entirely on or significantly use Rails. We want to highlight what's going on in the industry without turning the blog over to PR-speak! If you missed January's, check it out.
New Relic's $1,500 Data API Contest
Customers of New Relic's RPM Rails app monitoring service can now use a RESTful API to create new accounts, list applications, and display health indicators of apps including key metrics and the traffic light health status indicators. New Relic is keen for people to use the API (naturally!) and as a demonstration of their keenness they're offering up two prizes (one of $1,000 and one of $500 - both in Amazon gift certificates) for cool demonstrations of New Relic API usage.
RPM is free to use (in its Lite version) so anyone can enter. You could create a Mac widget, an iPhone app, a desktop app, a Ruby library of some sort - whatever. To sign up and/or learn more, check out their blog post on the contest. Closing date is March 15, 2009, so you have a while to get thinking..
Get Engine Yard's Rails Stack on Amazon EC2 with Solo
Everyone knows Engine Yard, right? They offer pretty high end Rails hosting, deployment and management for companies with big hosting budgets, right? Well, turns out that perception is no longer true. With their new "Engine Yard Solo" offering, you get Engine Yard's Rails stack and management tools all ready to run on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. It's metered and the minimum monthly spend is $129. Essentially, Engine Yard charges you a small premium over Amazon EC2's for all the things they add. There's also a screencast you can watch to learn more about it. Daniel Kehoe (an independent developer) has also written a small introduction to it.
(Update: I have just been informed New Relic will be offering app management for Engine Yard Solo within the next month!)
Brightbox asks.. Is it Ruby 1.9?
It's no big secret that Rails 1.9.1 was released last week. What is a bit of a mystery, however, is which libraries and gems actually work with it. 1.9.1 is a big change from 1.8.7 so libraries that dig into Ruby's internals or that compile against Ruby's development headers can get caught out. One place to keep an eye on until it's all sorted out is Is It Ruby 1.9? developed by British Rails hosting company, BrightBox.
RightScale + New Relic == Rails Performance Monitoring in the Cloud
I doubt they'd want me to put it precisely this way, but New Relic and RightScale have "got in to bed together" to combine their two best features.. RightScale's cloud management tech, and New Relic's Rails performance monitoring tech. So, if you're hosting on, say, Amazon EC2 and you're using RightScale's cloud management stuff, you can now very quickly tap into New Relic's RPM service to add enterprise-quality performance monitoring to your Rails app. I'm not a big fan of cloud computing but that sounds like a cool development and a natural complement of two businesses to me.
Disclaimer: None of the above news items or mentions were made for cash or similar benefit. Some companies (such as New Relic) may be Rails Inside sponsors - you can see these in our right sidebar - but no mentions here are dependent upon that. Get in touch if you have news you wish to run!
