RubySOC 2010 & Ruby Deployment
As you’re no doubt aware, the transition from 1.8 to 1.9 is no small feat. Many changes to the simple things (i.e Ruby string encoding) have ultimately meant that even a year later most production deployments of Ruby are on 1.8.
As a part of the 2010 Ruby Summer of Code, I proposed that if accepted I’d work on making it trivial for teams to test and deploy their applications against multiple ruby versions on the same server. Ideally, the notion being that I’d provide tools on top of the most popular ruby deployment and server management tools (e.g. Chef, Puppet, Capistrano) that leveraged rvm to do the heavy lifting.
As luck would have it, I’ve been accepted (with an awesome set of mentors – of note, my primary mentor is wayneeseguin, creator of rvm) to work so for the next 2-3 months I’ll be working on reaching that goal. As a part of this project, I’ll be working with many people within the community better evaluate what issues people have had and how we can make the process in general much easier for all ruby developers.
As a part of this (and more importantly, what this blog post is about) is that we are very interested in getting feedback from the ruby community – We want to help improve the existing tools in actual use cases rather than arbitrarily decided ones. So, we want your feedback – If you’ve deployed a rails application in the last few months and either looked into existing solutions / alternative ruby virtual machines or you’re doing it at the moment, get in contact with us (I’ll post details below).
Also, if you’re working on a deployment-related tool, we’d love to hear how we can make life easier for you. As an example, we’ve already organised a think tank with representatives for:
and a few more tools. If you have ideas to contribute, get in contact with us. We even have an open mailing list (rvm.deployment@librelist.com – email to subscribe) where we plan on discussing ideas, problems and solution.
Feel free to contact us in whichever manner is best for you; Be it via this the comments on this blog post, on twitter (@sutto or @wayneeseguin, directly to my email (sutto+rvm@sutto.net) or our mailing list (rvm.deployment@librelist.com). If you’re feeling particularily adventurous, we’re even up for chatting to you about it over skype (suttol) – We’ve even planned several calls witth the assembled think tank to brainstorm as a group.
We appreciate any and all feedback – even if it’s why existing solutions didn’t work for you.
