Having worked with traditional RDBMS’s for more than 10 years, learning about document databases such as Amazon SimpleDB and CouchDB took a bit to wrap my head around. What I found is that they have many benefits including speed and scalability. I learned more about Amazon SimpleDB while writing my latest article for Amazon Web Services: Building a Product Catalog with Amazon SimpleDB. The article shows you how to create a simple product catalog using Rails and Amazon SimpleDB. Happy coding!

I’ve updated my “Introduction to AWS for Ruby Developers” article on the Amazon Web Service Developer Connection site. The updated code uses Rails 2.1, the RightScale AWS Ruby gem and the Paperclip plugin for uploads to Amazon S3.

Ruby on Rails Specialist Initiates Fast, Hassle-Free EC2 Deployments by Partnering With Morph Labs

WINTER PARK, FL (July 22, 2008) — Leading web development firm and Ruby on Rails specialist Atlantic Dominion Solutions (ADS) today announced it has become a development partner to Morph Labs, maker of an elastic deployment and management platform for Ruby on Rails applications deployed onto the Amazon Web Services EC2 infrastructure. The addition of the Morph Application Platform enables ADS to offer clients a faster, easier, and less expensive way to deploy their Rails apps onto EC2 without any management overhead.

For organizations that need to launch a flexible, scalable app quickly but don’t have the technology resources required to configure or manage an EC2 deployment, the Morph Application Platform is an ideal solution. By eliminating the need for custom configuration, the platform allows users to deploy a Rails app in less than 10 minutes. Once the app is up and running on EC2, the Morph platform allows it to be scaled up or down with a single click, and it also performs automatic backups to eliminate the possibility of data loss in the rare case of an infrastructure failure.

As a specialist in agile web development and Ruby on Rails applications, ADS regularly leverages the EC2 infrastructure to give clients the ability to scale their Rails apps on demand. By becoming a development partner to Morph Labs, ADS enhances their offering with a fast, hassle-free way to take advantage of EC2’s benefits right away.

“We are extremely excited about partnering with Morph Labs,” said Atlantic Dominion Solutions CEO Robert Dempsey. “As soon as we saw what their platform could do, we knew it was imperative to make it available to our clients.”

“The scalability of EC2 is fantastic,” Dempsey continued, “but configuring and managing the deployment can require time and resources that not every organization has. With the Morph platform our Rails customers can get their apps up on EC2 in minutes and start enjoying its flexibility without any management overhead or technical resources.”

ADS builds scalable, database-backed Rails applications for organizations of all sizes and provides several management services for deployments on Amazon Web Services. Now adding an efficient solution for the organizations that don’t want to manage the deployment at all, Dempsey says the company expects its new partnership to create a powerful new channel for increasing its customer base for application development.

“For clients that have a time-sensitive app to launch and don’t need a lot of options to configure, it’s really the perfect answer.”

About Atlantic Dominion Solutions

ADS is a leading-edge web development firm that specializes in using Ruby on Rails to build advanced, scalable, database-backed applications for organizations of all sizes. Based on custom requirements, ADS creates forward-thinking and user-focused applications that can be deployed quickly, scaled easily, and maintained with minimal time or effort. ADS is a vanguard in enhancing Rails platforms with Amazon Web Services and, along with visionary web applications, ADS also provides data warehousing and data mining, graphic and interactive design, and business and technical consulting.

ADS is perpetually active in the web development community and the company’s founder and CEO Robert Dempsey is a frequent speaker at Ruby on Rails conferences nationwide. He is currently scheduled to be a featured speaker at this summer’s Ruby Hoedown (August 8-9 in Huntsville, AL). Learn more about the Ruby Hoedown. For more information about ADS, visit the main Atlantic Dominion Solutions site.

About Morph Labs

Morph Labs is the leading provider of Platform as a Service (PaaS) that virtualizes the application environment through the use of open source technologies to simplify the deployment, delivery, and management of web based applications. Morph Labs uses virtual infrastructures including Amazon Web Services to provide a truly elastic environment for web applications that can be instantly provisioned and seamlessly scaled.

Morph Labs is a global company with headquarters in Cebu City, Philippines with additional in-country operations in Manila along with Los Angeles, California and Austin, Texas in the U.S.A. For more information, visit Morph Labs.

I’m proud to be talking about Leveraging the Cloud with Ruby at the Ruby Hoedown this coming August. Ruby Hoedown is a regional Ruby conference held this year in Huntsville, Alabama. There is a great lineup of speakers and it should be a great time.

I’ll be discussing cloud computing and showing rich code examples of how Ruby developers can use services such as Amazon Web Services to build highly scalable applications. Do you want to see something specific? If you’re attending Ruby Hoedown and would like to see something in particular leave a comment here. Register for the Ruby Hoedown today and I’ll see you in August!

Atlantic Dominion Solutions partner RightScale has raised $4.5M from Benchmark Capital. RightScale’s management platform simplifies the deployment and management of applications utilizing Amazon Web Services, and adds additional capabilities like auto-scaling. The RightScale tools are an integral part of ADS Mantis for EC2, which provides 24×7 monitoring and management of EC2-based applications.

Read more about the funding RightScale received on c|net and Giga OM.

The Amazon Web Services team announced yesterday a much anticipated feature for Amazon EC2 – persistent storage. This feature is not yet available, but coming soon. Per the Amazon Web Service Blog,

“…our forthcoming persistent storage feature will give you the ability to create reliable, persistent storage volumes for use with EC2. Once created, these volumes will be part of your account and will have a lifetime independent of any particular EC2 instance.”

The new persistent storage feature will allow for unformatted disk volumes ranging from 1 GB to 1 TB, with the ability to attach one or more to a single EC2 instance. If that wasn’t enough, you will also be able to make snapshot backups of the volumes and store them on S3. All volumes will be accessible via an API and the EC2 command-line tools: CreateVolume, DeleteVolume, AttachVolume, and CreateSnapshot.

What is very cool about this new feature is that the volumes are independent of EC2 instances. Did your EC2 instance just vaporize? No problem. Fire up a new one and attached the volume.

Atlantic Dominion Solutions partner RightScale is ready to roll with support for the new volumes. I talked with Thorsten who told me,

“We already have quite extensive support in our internal systems (for persistent storage). We have the Ruby gem (right_aws) already done, so we can release that as soon as Amazon goes public with the details. But the heavy lifting comes with the volumes and the snapshots, supporting multiple database use cases. To be effective, you need to automate the whole snapshot schedule stuff, else you drown and you have no clue where the best copy of your data is.”

Amazon continues to up the ante with the upcoming persistent storage feature. With Google AppEngine now in the mix as a competitor, we look for even more innovation to come from the Amazon Web Services team.

Trying to make sense of the Google App Engine and what possibilities it holds I have compiled a list of what seems to be good, bad, and what I’m not quite sure about.

First, what seems bad:

Some Bad Things

1. You can not access the file system.
2. You can not run background processes, not even CRON.
3. You can not spawn off another thread / process.
4. Requests that take more than a few seconds are terminated (why would you do this to your users anyway?).
5. You are only able to access other sites and services using HTTP(S), so no fancy sockets or anything like that (this doesn’t seem bad, but it is a limitation).
6. You can’t use the Django authentication, admin, or session middleware apps (more on this below).
7. You can not use Django models.
8. Some standard libraries have been disabled, so not all Python modules are available.
9. As of right now, you can not use Ruby, PHP, C#, Java, or anything else. Only Python (is that so bad actually?).

Some Good Things

1. You use Python.
2. You can use Django.
3. It uses Googles DataStore and they provide a nice API (it’s similar to Django models).
4. The Django admin and authentication is handled by Google.
5. It scales.
6. Deploys fast and easy.
7. Monitoring is part of the admin console provided by Google.
8. You can include any pure Python libraries when you upload your application.

Some Things I am Unsure About

1. Vendor lock-in? If I want to move my app someplace else for example.
2. How is domain management handled?
3. GQL? I’m not sure what to make of it, except it looks like SQL. Are there any Limitations compared to SQL?

How does this compare to Amazon’s web developer services? Well, it seems the 2 services are not really comparable.

The only thing that seems to compare is the hosting platforms, that is EC2 and the whole GAE package. An EC2 instance is like a VPS, you have much more control (what gets installed, libraries, languages, database, etc). Setting up an EC2 instance is not difficult, but definitely not as easy as using GAE. If you like Python and don’t have any issues with the limitations Google has with it’s sandbox it seems like a great service. Actually it’s a great service regardless of those limitations.

Regarding S3 and SimpleDB, I don’t see how Google is even competing or offering a similar service with GAE. Did I miss something? These 2 services can be used from anywhere on the internet. As far I can tell, GAE does not have any sort of S3 equivalent and DataTable seems limited to being used inside GAE only.

Regardless of any of it’s current limitations, Google App Engine seems like a very cool neat service and I can’t wait to take advantage of it someday.

My question now is what type of apps can take advantage of this service?

Oh, and if you aren’t a big fan of Django for some unknown various reason, you can always try Pylons.

The Amazon EC2 team announced that they added two new features yesterday:

• Elastic IP Addresses
• Availability Zones

Elastic IP Addresses are static IP addresses associated with your AWS account rather than your EC2 instances. These addresses can be programmatically mapped to any instances that you have. What this allows is easier recovery in case of failure as well presenting your users with a static IP address (i.e. less DNS headaches).

The second new feature, availability zones, are made for high availability:

“Each Amazon EC2 Availability Zone is a distinct location that is engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. Previously, only very large companies had the scale to be able to distribute an application across multiple locations, but now it is as easy as changing a parameter in an API call. You can choose to run your application across multiple Availability Zones to be prepared for unexpected events such as power failures or network connectivity issues, or you can place instances in the same Availability Zone to take advantage of free data transfer and the lowest latency communication.”

Both of these features are very exciting as they address some of the current pitfalls of EC2. Read the official release here.

We’ve been doing Rails development at ADS for close to two-and-a-half years. When we launched our ADS Mantis service, it was to support our Rails development clients that wanted a fully managed EC2 deployment. We have been working with Amazon Web Services, specifically EC2, S3, and SQS, since they got out of private beta. Amazon Web Services are a core competency of Atlantic Dominion Solutions, and core to our business. As such, we are now happy to announce that we are extending ADS Mantis to cover any application deployed to Amazon EC2 using the RightScale platform.

So what does that mean for you? Regardless of your language of choice, if you are deploying onto EC2 using RightScale, then ADS Mantis can support you. You take care of your app, and we’ll work to ensure it stays up. Of course, if you are using Rails, then we can also help you tune the performance of your app as well.

For more information on ADS Mantis, visit our site.

Get started with Rails and Amazon Web Services with these articles:

Introduction to AWS for Ruby Developers
Economical Use of S3 with Ruby on Rails
Using Amazon S3, EC2, SQS, Lucene, and Ruby for Web Spidering

Connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or recommend me on Working With Rails.

We received this email this morning from RightScale, an ADS partner.

—
Dear Customer,

At 7:35 EST Amazon S3 service started given 503 service unavailable messages. We have contacted Amazon and they have confirmed the problem and they are working on resolving it. The main effect on our customers is that 10-minute backups are not happening and operations that rely on S3 fail. Amazon has not giving an expected time to resolution yet. We will keep you informed. We apologize for the inconvenience.

The RightScale Team.
—

We received this soon after we noticed the outage ourselves. This type of information is extremely important to get out to clients when situations such as downtime occur, so that they are not surprised and you don’t hear the “why didn’t you tell me.” Transparency, honesty, and communication are the keys to great business relationships.

UPDATE

Soon after I put up the post S3 is back up. Happy days.