Ruby Inspirations
A few months ago I started going to the monthly meetings of the Columbus Ruby Brigade, basically a computer user group of Ruby programmers.
The first meeting I went to had a talk on the latest version of the Ruby On Rails web development framework, as well as a talk on the latest version of a tool for deploying web applications. I soon started transitioning over to using that tool to make my life as a sysadmin easier.
The second meeting introduced JRuby, an implementation of Ruby that runs on the Java Virtual Machine; it adds speed, access to Java libraries, and potentially easier deployment. Despite my inexperience with Java this sounded quite useful to me, so I went out and bought a book on the topic, as well as a current book on Java. My next server may make use of all this.
At my third Ruby meeting last night there was a talk on Amazon Web Services, particularly the S3 data storage service and EC2 dynamic virtual server service. The obvious use of S3 is for backups (and it's cheap enough for personal backups), and I was later pleased to learn that the people have already implemented interfaces to it that I'd use, such a backup solution, an rsync-workalike, and various implementations of a Linux filesystem. It seems to be pretty cheap too.
Then as EC2 was described, with its pricing model of 10 cents per hour of uptime (coming out to $72/month fulltime) and ability to dynamically start and stop new instances at any time, I started to realize one thing that could be useful for.... The one really computer-intensive thing I do is email spam/virus filtering; it takes ten seconds to check each message that goes through my mail server, so when there's a heavy load that could slow things down. If I could offload that to EC2 servers as needed, that might prevent me from needing to buy a new server.... And of course someone else already thought of this more than a year ago, though I haven't yet found evidence of an existing implementation.
So I've gotten something useful out of every meeting so far. That beats my experience at COLUG. I think I'll keep going.
The first meeting I went to had a talk on the latest version of the Ruby On Rails web development framework, as well as a talk on the latest version of a tool for deploying web applications. I soon started transitioning over to using that tool to make my life as a sysadmin easier.
The second meeting introduced JRuby, an implementation of Ruby that runs on the Java Virtual Machine; it adds speed, access to Java libraries, and potentially easier deployment. Despite my inexperience with Java this sounded quite useful to me, so I went out and bought a book on the topic, as well as a current book on Java. My next server may make use of all this.
At my third Ruby meeting last night there was a talk on Amazon Web Services, particularly the S3 data storage service and EC2 dynamic virtual server service. The obvious use of S3 is for backups (and it's cheap enough for personal backups), and I was later pleased to learn that the people have already implemented interfaces to it that I'd use, such a backup solution, an rsync-workalike, and various implementations of a Linux filesystem. It seems to be pretty cheap too.
Then as EC2 was described, with its pricing model of 10 cents per hour of uptime (coming out to $72/month fulltime) and ability to dynamically start and stop new instances at any time, I started to realize one thing that could be useful for.... The one really computer-intensive thing I do is email spam/virus filtering; it takes ten seconds to check each message that goes through my mail server, so when there's a heavy load that could slow things down. If I could offload that to EC2 servers as needed, that might prevent me from needing to buy a new server.... And of course someone else already thought of this more than a year ago, though I haven't yet found evidence of an existing implementation.
So I've gotten something useful out of every meeting so far. That beats my experience at COLUG. I think I'll keep going.