Sessions at RailsConf 2012 on Wednesday 25th April in Salon H

In the 21st century successful teams are data-driven. We’ll present a complete introduction to everything you need to start monitoring your service at every level from business drivers to per-request metrics in Rails/Rack, down to server memory/cpu. Provides a high-level overview of the fundamental components that comprise a holistic monitoring system and then drills into real-world examples with tools like ActiveSupport::Notifications, statsd/rack-statsd, and CollectD. Also covers best practices for active alerting on custom monitoring data.

Chanko provides a simple framework for rapidly and safely prototyping new features in your production Rails app, and exposing these prototypes to specified segments of your user base.

With Chanko, you can release many concurrent features and independently manage which users see them. If there are errors with any chanko, it will be automatially removed, without impacting your site.

Chanko was extracted from Cookpad.com where the team uses it daily to test new features live, in production, on the largest Rails site in Japan which serves 500 million page views a month to a user based of over 15 million highly engaged uses.

Even the simplest of Rails applications can eventually grow into a twisted mess of complexity. At some point you will need a background task, or a long-running service, or a scheduled job, or all of the above and more. All of these little bits of functionality added to an application ad hoc can keep you up at night with cold sweats and nightmares. But it doesn't have to be that way.

In this presentation, we will examine a complex Rails application - complexity that is eventually common to most modern Rails apps: background tasks, scheduled jobs, WebSockets, long-running services, caching and more. We will look at the challenges inherent in these features for both development and deployment. Then we'll look to TorqueBox for simple solutions to these complex problems. You'll never have that long-runing service using the wrong Ruby code again; no more environment variable nightmares in your cron jobs. You can sleep better now.

TorqueBox is a Ruby application server that is built on JRuby and JBoss AS7. It provides asynchronous messaging, scheduled jobs, long-running processes, caching, simple deployment, and much more. TorqueBox is designed to bring the power, scalability and stability of these time-tested JavaEE services to Ruby applications through a simple and expressive Ruby interface.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past year you might know of Travis CI, the continuous integration service for the open source community.

Travis started as a single GitHub project which was a rails app and a resque background task. Compare that to 12 months later where Travis is now four separate deployable apps, uses two different rubies (1.9.2 and jruby), and comprises a total of 10 GitHub projects.

Apart from looking at how Travis works now, we will also look at how it got there, and how we broke Travis up into smaller more manageable, more concise encapsulated services.