Stack Smashing

"Stack Smashing" refers to an internal project where I took our production Rails application environment down from over 100 virtual machines to 2 physical machines. Our application environment for Major League Gaming consists of 13+ inter-connected applications with millions of users to provide functionality such as single-sign on, online video (both video on demand and UGC), news and live competition information, photo galleries, profiles, and much more. We simply needed a simpler infrastructure in which to develop and deploy our applications. In this talk, we will cover the following:

• Network topology before and after, as well as the makeup of our virtual and physical machines.
• Detailed discussion of Chef recipes, NGINX, HAProxy configurations and updates to standard configurations.
• Application and service monitoring and configuration.
• Application migration from the old stack to the new stack.
• Rails 3 to Rails 3.1 upgrade insights.
• Unicorns!
• Strategies for service configuration to handle failure.
• Offline processing with queueing and queue management.
• Simplifying, standardizing and sexy-fying your Capistrano-based deployment tasks into a reusable gem.
• Behavior driven infrastructure monitoring and validation.
• Adopting an opt-in continuous deployment strategy that is integrated with our continuous integration environment.

This will be a very code and example-focused talk. Come and learn about the ways that you can simplify your existing infrastructure.