Adam and I visited the posh South Park Engine Yard office to talk with Ezra Zygmuntowicz. We covered hosting, managing open source, and even a bit about writing a book.
shownotes
- Ezra was a glass artist during the 90’s
- Yakima Herald was Ezra’s start in rails and deployment
- February 2006, they co-founded Engine Yard
- EY employs 65 people on 4 continents, providing 24×7 coverage
- Engine Yard has a data center on the east coast and west coast
- EY has two sides to the company, hosting and open source development
- Jamie van Dyke has been working on Samurai
- They hired Evan to work full time on Rubinius
- Ezra didn’t see a point for mod_rails for EY clients
- A number of clients are using Thin (including us now)
- Mod_rails didn’t support rack (at the time of the interview), but now does!
- Ezra is backporting Merb rack stuff to Rails
- DHH likes to call things “Highly optimized pieces of code”
- Ezra – “It is hard to let go and not touch every piece of the business as the startup grows”
- Working on an open source that EY sponsors is a good way to get noticed
- Matt Palmer rewrote part of SSHD to make github work in a more stable fashion
- Merb started as a small hack to easily deploy small sites
- Merb and Rubinius have an open commit bit policy, just submit a couple good patches and you can get full access
- Git changes open source projects to be more survival of the fittest
- Github has helped even get back changes for Josh’s own project, Signal Wiki
- Merb and Rubinius have highly active IRC channels and mailing lists
- Setting up guidelines for commits and documentation are key to a big project being successful
- Ugly code breeds ugly code
- No code is faster than no code
- Ezra didn’t fork the ruby web community!
- A merb/rails performance battle can only benefit the user bases of each
- Even with the open commit bit, you still have to promote your philosophies and let people know your roadmap
- Engine Yard is seeing tons of growth from large companies and solid growth from startups too
- Matz and the core ruby team agreed to use RubySpec from Rubinius to have a new test/spec to test Ruby interpreters against
- EY cluster is a 48U rack with six 24-disk SANs, 18 compute nodes each with 32gb of Ram and 8 CPUs
- Each EY machine boots off a USB thumb drive which mounts the SAN disks
- This allows them to move the thumb drive and then can spin a client back up on the fly
- They suggest two slices, so you can do incremental updates, etc
- They use GFS to let the slices share the same files (supports 16 slices)
- The mysql servers are tuned by outside experts, with weekly reporting on performance
- Tastyplanner is hosted at Engine Yard
- Tastyplanner used the rails default joins/includes and killed all our mongrels on Rails (via memory consumption)
- Even though EY has 2000+ slices, they all use the same “stack” and that allows them to easily debug/find issues quickly
- Ezra reads HackerNews/Ycombinator, but the volume is getting crazy to follow everything else
- Ezra likes The Pragamtic Programmer for a book
- Ezra has his own book! He thought writing was a bit tough, though
- We almost got our super secret info! Darn Ezra!
Ezra Zygmuntowicz
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