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Win a Free Ticket to php|tek for Your User Group! »

Created at: 17.05.2012 00:05, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: community Contests events php

User group leaders, listen up! We have an extra Full Experience tickets to php|tek, and we'd like to give it to the community to use. php|tek happens May 22-25 in Chicago, Illinois, and is jam packed with PHP goodness, including an Unconference and a Hackathon. I mean, have you seen this schedule?!  Your winner is also welcome to join us at the Engine Yard JAUNT on Friday night after the conference. There is undoubtedly much awesomeness to be had next week.

If you are interested in participating, drop me a line by Thursday, May 17 and let me know. We'll randomly select a user group to receive the ticket, and you can give it out however you wish. Thumb wrestling champion? Karaoke competition? Hackathon winner? Best high fiver? It's really up to you.

As soon as you have a winner, let me know and we'll make the arrangements with the fine folks at Blue Parabola, hosts of the conference.

#350 REST API Versioning »

Created at: 16.05.2012 10:00, source: Railscasts

APIs should be consistent, but it is difficult to do this when returning a JSON response along side the HTML interface. Here I show how to add a versioned, RESTful API. The version can be determined from either the URL or HTTP headers.

Announcing Database-less environments »

Created at: 16.05.2012 03:35, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Add-ons databases Engine Yard Cloud mongodb mysql PostgreSQL Technology

At Engine Yard, we believe that you should have the flexibility to set up your environments and manage your data stores as you see fit. This is something we take seriously as we continue to evolve Engine Yard Cloud and today, we are happy to announce database-less environments as an alpha release. If you need to utilize data offerings outside of our natively supported MySQL or PostgreSQL, then this feature will enable you to do so.

Enabling the feature

With database-less environments, it is no longer necessary to have a MySQL or PostgreSQL instance in every environment. Simply boot up a ‘No Database’ cluster with one of our Add-on database providers or roll your own using utility instances. Now it is easier and more affordable than ever to get started on Engine Yard.

You can enable this feature using the Early Access tools. Once you have the 'No db' feature enabled, you will be able to select the "No Database (Alpha)" option under Database Stack on the new environment form.

You can add as many application instances and utilities as you need, and you can stop paying for database masters that you don’t use.  For example, you can follow the Mongoid RailsCast (Episode 238) and create a simple blog using Mongoid using two application instances and three utility nodes.

Add-ons and DBaaS

You can also use the ‘No Database’ feature in combination with our Add-on Program (login required).  For example, you can have a simple application with just one instance and an external database. See the Database section of our Add-on Program for more information.

We hope you enjoy this feature and let us know what you think.

Notes

Removal of the database.yml file
Environments without databases will not have a database.yml file generated by Engine Yard Cloud. Enabling this feature means that you are either not using ActiveRecord or you have supplied your own database.yml file in your repository.

Infographic: A Mobile Storm in the Cloud »

Created at: 16.05.2012 01:47, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Engine Yard Cloud News Technology

Did you know that there are 3 billion more smartphones on earth than there are humans? Maybe that doesn’t come as much of a surprise to you. But what you might find more surprising is that the growth in smartphone adoption has actually contributed to Engine Yard’s success. That’s right: as smartphone adoption has grown, so has app consumption. As a result, businesses are now prioritizing mobile application development. By 2015, mobile application development projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of 4 to 1. Innovation in mobile is imperative, and there’s a need for tools that enable businesses to innovate quickly. Many cloud computing technologies--like Engine Yard's Platform as a Service--have enabled developers and businesses to focus on application innovation.

The below infographic includes even more interesting facts about innovations in mobile, cloud computing and PaaS. Check it out and let us know where you think these fields are headed next.

Copy and paste onto your blog:

<a href="http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/platform-as-a-service/"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-12384" src="http://www.engineyard.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/platform-as-a-service-v2.jpg" alt="Platform as a Service" width="930" height="5572" /></a><br/>Courtesy of: <a href="http://www.engineyard.com">Engine Yard</a>

Exciting New Integration: Badgeville in our Helpdesk! »

Created at: 15.05.2012 18:17, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Customers Technology Tips & Tricks

We are pleased to announce that we have integrated Badgeville’s gamification technology into our Zendesk ticketing system.  As you use the helpdesk to perform different actions,  (searching documentation, contributing to forums, completing satisfaction surveys, etc.) you will be able to earn many different badges and complete many different missions.

Through this integration we hope to increase community engagement, and to not only give you new channels to share your experiences and ideas, but also to reward you for it!

While inside our helpdesk, if you hover over a user’s picture, a little summary profile will appear showing how many points and rewards that user has, as well as the last badge that they have earned.

By clicking on “Click for profile” you will be brought to the user’s showcase that shows their progress on the current missions, with hints on how to earn the badges associated with them.  You will also be able to see your showcase anytime, by clicking on the “Profile” link in the upper right corner.

Also, there have been a few new Community forums opened up in the last week, so if you want to share your ideas and start earning some badges, check them out here!

Keep your eyes open. We will be introducing additional missions in the future.  If you have any questions or feedback, please open a ticket and I will get back to you!

Happy playing!

All Presentation Software is Broken »

Created at: 14.05.2012 10:00, source: igvita.com

Whenever the point I'm trying to make lacks clarity, I often find myself trying to dress it up: fade in the points, slide in the chart, make prettier graphics. It is a great tell when you catch yourself doing it. Conversely, I have yet to see a presentation or a slide that could not have been made better by stripping the unnecessary visual dressing. Simple slides require hard work and a higher level of clarity and confidence from the presenter.

All presentation software is broken. Instead of helping you become a better speaker, we are competing on the depth of transition libraries, text effects, and 3D animations. Prezi takes the trophy. As far as I can tell, it is optimized for precisely one thing: generating nausea.

Next Presentation Platform: Browser

If you want your message to travel, then the browser is your (future) presentation platform of choice. No proprietary formats, no conversion nightmares, instant access from billions of devices, easy sharing, and more. Granted, the frameworks and the authoring tools are still lacking, but that is only a matter of time.

Unfortunately, we are off to a false start. Instead of trying to make the presenter more effective, we are too busy trying to replicate the arsenal of useless visual transitions with the HTML5, CSS3 and WebGL stacks. Spinning WebGL cubes and CSS transitions make for a fun technology demo but add zero value - someone, please, stop the insanity. We have web connectivity, ability to build interactive slides, and get realtime feedback and analytics from the audience. There is nothing to prove by imitating the broken features of PowerPoint and Keynote, let's leverage the strengths of the web platform instead.

Free Lunch: Web Analytics

Keynote, PowerPoint and friends are optimized to help hide your incompetence: no useful feedback, no way to measure the effectiveness of your delivery or reach of the message. On the web, we inherit all of the power of web analytics for free. We can measure slide impressions, time on slide, referrals, clicks, display heatmaps, segment the viewers, setup conversion goals and more. Let's look at a real-life example.

I've instrumented my RailsConf presentation (Making the Web Faster) with Google Analytics, where I'm tracking slide transitions and clicks via custom events and time on slide via the user timings API:

7.5K+ visits, 200K+ slides impressions, and a 40%+ return rate. An average user took 19 minutes to make their way through the slides, which translates to just over 100 "cognitive days" across all visitors. It took me roughly 20 hours to make the slides from scratch, which translates to a 1:120 hour ratio. Is this good? We can't say, but it is a baseline. I would love to compare these numbers to other RailsConf presentations.

Vanity counters are fun to share, but did the presentation convey the right message? The goal was to focus the audience on optimizing for user perceived latency and the available tools. The peaks in time on slide up to slide 20 correspond to off-site clicks to Navigation Timing spec, Google Analytics documentation, and examples - mission accomplished. Slides 30 to 40 are mostly flat: I need do a better job of motivating webpagetest.org, because it is an amazing tool. Finally, the big timing spike at the end corresponds to slides on mod_pagespeed. Next time around I will make sure to spend more time on it.

Video & YouTube Analytics

The presentation was recorded and I uploaded it to my own YouTube account - this gives you a lot of great analytics. First, it is reassuring to see that web visitors and YouTube audience retention follows the same pattern, with many of the same peaks and valleys. The added bonus: I can click on any time point and review my delivery. And what's the retention peak of entire presentation? An "inception" demo of opening Chrome's inspector, on the inspector! Not surprisingly, this also corresponds to the reaction of the audience during the live presentation.

Make me a better presenter, please!

If I was to give the same presentation again given the information above, I am confident I could now do a better job of it. Except, of course, I wouldn't give the same presentation since I can clearly see the sections that need to be improved, and a few sections that need to be cut.

I would love to see some experiments with live session feedback: am I going too fast, should I revisit a concept, perhaps even live questions. Add a websocket endpoint and all of the above is easily done. This space is ripe for disruption. Forget the animations, ornate templates, and other me-too gimmicks, make me a better presenter.

Engine Yard Expands IaaS Offerings with HP Cloud Services »

Created at: 10.05.2012 15:01, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Engine Yard Cloud News Partners

We’re excited to announce that we’re expanding the infrastructure options available to our customers with support for HP Cloud Services. We empower developers by providing a rock-solid platform with choices of infrastructure and components that make their job of building great applications as easy as possible. Engine Yard is one of the first PaaS providers to add support for HP’s public cloud, which is based on their world-class hardware and software, using key elements of the HP Converged Infrastructure combined with OpenStack technology.

For the past six years, our customers have relied on the Engine Yard platform to enable them to innovate faster, with higher reliability and while maintaining control of their environment. We continue to invest deeply in our open source PaaS to provide value for our customers. We want to ensure developers can rapidly build and iterate their applications while using Engine Yard Cloud to provide the on-demand scalability and reliability they need as their businesses grow and succeed.

By combining our leading commercial-grade open PaaS with HP's public cloud infrastructure offerings, we’re providing development teams a powerful new solution to rapidly deploy both large and small applications in the cloud. Engine Yard has deep roots in open source, and we continue to champion open computing by adding new IaaS options like HP’s public cloud.

We’ll be announcing more details about availability. To get updates, click here.

How to fix the Ruby 1.9 HTTPS/Bundler segmentation fault on OS X Lion »

Created at: 09.05.2012 21:38, source: Phusion Corporate Blog, tagged: ruby

If you’ve installed a gem bundle on OS X Lion the past few weeks then you may have seen the dreaded “[BUG] Segmentation fault” error, where Ruby sees to crash in the connect C function in http.rb. Upgrading to the latest Ruby 1.9.3 version (p194) doesn’t seem to help. Luckily someone has found a solution for this problem.

It turns out the segmentation fault is caused by an incompatibility between MacPort’s OpenSSL and RVM. MacPorts installs everything to /opt/local but RVM does not look for OpenSSL in /opt/local. We solved the problem by reinstalling Ruby 1.9.3 with the MacPorts OpenSSL, as follows:

sudo port install libyaml
rvm reinstall ruby-1.9.3 --with-openssl-dir=/opt/local --with-opt-dir=/opt/local

#348 The Rails API Gem »

Created at: 09.05.2012 10:00, source: Railscasts

It is often asked: Is Rails a good fit if I only need to serve an API? In this episode I show how to use the Rails API gem to create a slimmer Rails application designed to respond with JSON.

All About High Availability »

Created at: 09.05.2012 02:22, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Technology Tips & Tricks training

What is a High Availability system? There are multiple opinions/definitions of high availability. Some people refer to it as Disaster Recovery; I refer to it as an implementation to ensure that business systems spend minimal time down from a disaster.

For the purpose of this post, I think we should establish a description of Disaster Recovery and how it relates to High Availability. Disaster recovery includes the processes, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. There are 7 tiers to disaster recovery; tier 0 is no data loss prevention or basically several single points of failure, while tier 8, which is a fully automated failover system with zero to minimal data loss. Tier 7 and 8 are more in the classification of High Availability. Recognizing that there are plenty of discussions, opinions, and confusion regarding High Availability/Disaster Recovery, I have decided to discuss what I believe is the most logical solution for e-commerce and mission critical cloud applications.

Utilizing cloud technology for applications has grown immensely over the past 3 years. This growth is due to the fact that IT organization (or lack there of) has minimal responsibility, overhead and maintenance. All of this equates to less money spent and larger margins on revenues.

Although this has its upsides, there are many pitfalls associated as well. Some of these are lack of control over infrastructure, lack of knowledge as to what infrastructure is to be utilized and a lack of knowledge about the maintenance of this infrastructure. It is important to remember that cloud infrastructure is subject to outages just as normal infrastructure would be. A virtualized environment is a great way to minimize costs and maximize margins, but it does not prevent against outages. To minimize the lack of control clients have over these systems it is recommended that one invest into an insurance policy that would minimize down time during a man made or natural disaster.

The most logical or practical insurance plan to ensure ones business stays up with minimal down time is to implement a geo redundant High Availability system. A geo redundant system is basically a master/slave system located in two separate geographical locations. This is very similar to what most everyone implements with their local databases, in the event of the master database failing the slave takes over to where the application has minimal to no data loss with minimal application downtime.

Accurately implementing requires that the database replication is constant, in our agile world we also need to ensure that all code is pushed to both locations, the directory structures are replicated at a specific intervals and that all of the policies and procedures are in place to fail over from one geo location to the other geo location with minimal downtime and maximized efficiency. With the lack of control in cloud computing and the definite knowledge that an outage will occur, the logical solution to ensure Application up time and minimal Data loss is to implement a Geo-Redundant High Availability system.

We at Engine Yard recognize the need that clients have in running their applications on the cloud and that downtime equate to loss of revenue and more importantly possible loss of client. We have now implemented this technology and are offering it to clients that need that solid insurance.

Check out Engine Yard Professional Services page to learn more. If you have any questions about services offered for the Engine Yard PaaS, please feel free to contact proservices@engineyard.com.