Sponsor Keynote: Agility in Deployment - Rails in the Cloud Jon Crosby (Engine Yard)

During the morning session Engine Yard announced their new Rails on EC2 (Amazon’s compute cloud) solution: Flex

You can one button deploy to the cloud. It is a self healing cluster: Each node is in a load balancing pool. If one fails they automatically startup a new one to take over.

It can use a web interface or capistrano.

You can create a clone of the whole production environment with the data. So you can practice deploying to your cluster. Then you can blow away the staging environment when you’re done with it. Nice. Keeping a staging environment around all the time is very costly if you want it to accurately simulate your production environment.

Flex will be available in June

Chad Fowler then introduced Chris Wanstrath for his keynote. While introducing him he mentioned that when he first saw git he didn’t like it much. But he, and a lot of others, adopted it because of Github. I agree.

Chris Wanstrath (GitHub) Keynote

Some of his thoughts:

It’s not too hard to become a famous Rails Blogger/Speaker, but the people he respects are the coders who contribute year after year and blog as an afterthought (or even not at all).

Do you want to be Kid Rock or a good programmer?

The inspiration for GitHub was all the friction in the open source project community. GitHub is all about making open source and collaboration easy. You can start an open source project in a few minutes instead of applying to SourceForge which takes days.

Time to go give my talk…