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April 15th, 2010

Custom application and CMS integration

Posted by jeremy on April 15th, 2010

When we release a SaaS web application, such as IntuitionHQ, it’s inevitable that there will be two parts that make it up. The main part is the application itself. The second part is the marketing site that goes with it. The marketing site includes the content, and usually a way to sign up. It normally requires some integration with the application.

We choose Radiant for our CMS when working on internal projects. The reason we like it is for it’s simplicity and power. In this post I’ll go through the different ways we’ve experimented with to integrate our SaaS applications with Radiant based websites.

more »

Tags: radiant, rails, ruby
Posted in: Ruby on Rails
2 Comments
 
October 29th, 2009

Hosting in the cloud

Posted by Nathan on October 29th, 2009

It’s been a busy time here at Boost, and we have just released our new web usability testing application IntuitionHQ. I’ll be writing a post about IntuitionHQ soon, but today I’d like to talk about hosting.

When we launched SonarHQ in April we decided to host on Slicehost. There were two main reasons we went with a virtualised hosting solution. The first was that we were not sure whether we would be scaling vertically (bigger, faster servers) or horizontally (splitting different functions onto different servers), and the second was the we wanted to be able to scale up and down in a fine-grained way.

Our initial approach with SonarHQ was to have 2 applications servers, 2 database servers and a utility server (for background tasks including mail). This approach gave us some redundancy and the ability to scale in either horizontally or vertically as needed. This has worked well, but we didn’t feel that the performance/price ratio is particularly good.

During our initial testing, we had IntuitionHQ setup at Slicehost in the same way. As we were preparing to launch, Engine Yard released Engine Yard Cloud. Built on top of the Amazon cloud infrastructure, Engine Yard Cloud provides a managed instance and configuration engine specifically optomised for hosting Ruby on Rails applications.

It was easy and painless to get IntuitionHQ up and running on Engine Yard Cloud – taking under an hour from start to finish. I don’t think it could have been any easier – everything just seems to work! We fired up a small instance and put through a quick series of load tests. It was evident even with casual clicking through the application that we were getting better response times. Working through the likely costs for hosting on Engine Yard Cloud, we found that we could use a 32bit, 5 ECU, 1.7GB RAM  instance for around the same cost as our previous setup and get a useful boost in both performance and manageability.

One of the most significant benefits is the ability to scale vertically all the way to a 64bit, 20 ECU, 68GB RAM instance with a simple restart. Scaling horizontally is just as easy, and Engine Yard Cloud really takes the pain out of this.

Another important benefit has been the streamlining of our deployment processes. Engine Yard takes care of everything needed for automated deployments, and any custom deployment tasks are easily handled with Chef recipes. Deploying multiple application instances is easy and works seamlessly, with Engine Yard implementing a proxying system with failover across all instances without the need for a separate proxy instance (and single point of failure) – a significant cost saving. Running a seperate instance (or set of instances) for the databases is as easy as ticking a checkbox.

The image used for the instance is kept up to date with the latest security and reliability patches and is used each time our application is deployed. This gives you a semi-managed hosting system without any of the associated costs.

The margin over standard Amazon EC2 is reasonably high for the small instances but reduces to a 10% premium on the biggest instances. This is very reasonable and for us makes a great deal of sense.

The one thing that would make this much more affordable is the ability to use Amazon reserved instances. These give you a discounted hourly rate for the instance once a one off payment is made. If you know what you need and can commit to a year, this can effectively half the hosting costs.

We launched IntuitionHQ a week ago and have been extremely happy with the performance and utility of Engine Yard Cloud. We are looking forward to growing IntuitionHQ and are confident that Engine Yard Cloud can grow with us.

Tags: Deployment, Development, Hosting, rails, ruby
Posted in: Ruby on Rails
No Comments
 
October 27th, 2009

How the west was clustered

Posted by jeremy on October 27th, 2009
Screen shot 2009-10-27 at 9.20.25 AM

A cluster on IntuitionHQ

Our new product, IntuitionHQ, shows clusters of clicks on an image. To generate these clusters we made use of a gem called Hierclust. The great thing about this gem is it’s simplicity – just input the points and a minimum cluster separation, and out come the clusters.

The problem with Hierclust was the performance. With fewer than 100 points to cluster Hierclust was running too slow to do it dynamically. This was no problem, we moved the clustering program into a cronjob and stored the data in a marshalled file.

However, in testing we found that Hierclust was still too slow. Once we had over 200 points being clustered it started taking minutes to process – an unsustainable amount of time for the data we expected. The graph below shows the timings, which I believe is O(n3). We had to disable cluster processing while looking at the problem due to issues it was causing on the server.

Screen shot 2009-10-27 at 10.14.36 AM

Graph of points v time taken

more »

Tags: rails, ruby
Posted in: Development
1 Comment
 
September 11th, 2009

Squirrel and the custom nut matcher

Posted by jeremy on September 11th, 2009

I recently found squirrel, and I wanted to use it for a project we’re working on to simplify some complex finder statements. Squirrel allows turning something like this:

Task.find(:all,
  :conditions => [
    'active = ? and (updated_at > cache_version or cache_version IS NULL)', true
  ]
)

into:

Task.find(:all) do
  active == true
  any do
    updated_at > cache_version
    cache_version.nil?
  end
end

The problem is testing

Then I ran into a serious problem – how to test this piece of code using rspec? Here was my first attempt: more »

Tags: rails, rspec, ruby, tdd
Posted in: Development, Ruby on Rails
2 Comments
 
August 20th, 2009

Choosing which database indexes to add

Posted by jeremy on August 20th, 2009

When writing a Rails application, how do you decide on the best indexes to add to your database? It might seem obvious, especially if you work on a project from scratch. The problem is a little harder when you come to optimize an existing codebase.

New Relic

Recently I’ve been using two methods to work out where to put indexes. Firstly I’d strongly recommend using New Relic RPM in development mode. When running your application you can visit /newrelic to get all kinds of useful information. Here you can see the most recent rails calls:

Picture 4

more »

Tags: mysql, rails
Posted in: Development, Ruby on Rails
2 Comments
 
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