The Devver Blog

From the beginning of Devver, we decided we wanted to work with some new technologies and we wanted to be able to scale easily. After looking at options AWS seemed to have many technologies that could help us build and scale a system like Devver. One of these technologies was SimpleDB. One of the other new things we decided to try was DataMapper (DM) rather than the more familiar ActiveRecord. This eventually let me to work on my own SimpleDB DataMapper adapter.

Searching for ways to work with SDB using Ruby, we found a SimpleDB DM adapter by Jeremy Boles. It worked well initially but as our needs grew (and to make it compatible with the current version of DM) it became necessary to add and update the features of the adapter. These changes lived hidden in our project's code for awhile, for no other reason than we were too lazy to really commit it all back on GitHub. Recently though there has been a renewed interest about working with on SimpleDB with Ruby. I started pushing the code updates on GitHub, then I got a couple requests and suggestions here and there to improve the adapter. One of these suggestions cam from Ara Howard, who is doing impressive work of his own on Ruby and AWS, specifically SimpleDB. His suggestion on moving from the aws_sdb gem to right_aws, which along with other changes improved performance significantly (1.6x on write, up to 36x on reading large queries over the default limit of 100 objects). Besides performance improvements, we have recently added limit and sorting support to the adapter.

As I added features, testing the adapter also became slow, (over a minute a run) because the functional tests actually connect to and use SimpleDB. Since Devver is all about speeding up Ruby tests, I decided to get the tests running on Devver. It was actually very easy and sped up the test suite from 1 minute and 8 seconds down to 28 seconds. You can check out how much Devver speeds up the results yourself.

We are currently using the SimpleDB adapter to power our Devver.net website as well as the Devver backend service. It has been working well for us, but we know that it doesn't cover everyone's needs. Next time you are creating a simple project, give SimpleDB a look, we would love feedback about the DM adapter, and it would be great to get some other people contributing to the project. If anyone does fork my SDB Adapter Github repo, feel free to send me pull requests. Also, let me know if you want to try using Devver as you hack on the adapter, it can really speed up testing, and I would be happy to give out a free account.

Lastly, at a recent Boulder Ruby users group meet up, the group did a code review for the adapter. It went well and I should finish cleaning up the code and get the improvements suggested by the group committed to GitHub soon.

Update: The refactorings suggested at the code review are now live on GitHub.

I wanted a quick way when out and about to easily manage our AWS EC2 instances while out and about. It hasn't happened often, but occasionally I am away from the computer and I need to reboot the instances. Perhaps I remember our developer cluster isn't being used and want to shut it down to save some money.

I didn't find anything simple and free with a quick Google search, so in a about an hour I wrote a nice little Sinatra app that will let me view our instances, shutdown, or reboot any specific instance or all of them. The tiny framework actually turned out to be even more useful as I now have options that let us tail error logs, reboot Apache, reboot mongrel clusters, or execute any common system administration task.

I won't be going into detail on how to build a iPhone webapp using Sinatra and iUI, because Ben already created an excellent post detailing all of those steps. In fact I used his old project as the template when I created this project. I can't begin to explain how amazingly simple it is to build an iPhone webapp using Sinatra, so if you have been thinking of a quick project I highly recommend it.

Here are some screen shots showing the final app. (screenshot courtesy of iPhoney):

ec2 manager home view.

ec2 manager describe instances view.

ec2 manager instance view.

This app uses the Amazon EC2 API Tools to do all the heavy lifting. So this app assumes that you already have the tools installed and working on the machine you want this app to run on. This normally involves installing the tools and setting up some environment variables like EC2_HOME, so make sure you can run ec2-describe-instances from the machine. After that you should just have to change EC2_HOME in the Sinatra app to match the path where you installed the EC2 tools.

Let me know if you have any issues, it is quick and dirty, but I have already found it useful.

To run the app:
cmd> ruby -rubygems ./ec2_manager.rb