May 31, 2013: This Week at Engine Yard

Spent an awesome week at DevOps Day Berlin and visiting customers in Berlin with application engineer extraordinaire Kevin Holler and our fearless sales leader Bridget Gleason. So fantastic to see the exchange of best practices and ideas around DevOps and get a chance to check out the Berlin tech community!

We’re planning to be at DevOps Day Amsterdam in a few weeks too, so hope to see you there!

–Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

The EngineYard gem 2.1.0 has been released with a bunch of enhanced capabilities, including new asset strategies. We received a lot of customer requests around these areas and hope that this will make you super happy. Read all about it on the change log and the readme on github.

Ruby 2.0 is now in GA on Engine Yard Cloud! Read all about it. We have released our new hardened Gentoo stack in GA (Gentoo 12.11), with all the latest and greatest packages and features that the new Gentoo has to offer. It only works in new environments, so if you are going to spin up a new environment, check it out!

We’ve updated the worker counts for Passenger/Unicorn/etc.. and exposed some easy ways for customers to alter the worker counts, memory thresholds, and other cool stuff. Read all about how to do it here! This allows customers to avoid writing custom chef to alter some of this stuff. As always, if you need any help, open a support ticket!

Workers are the processes that allow your application to respond to incoming web requests. Regardless of the application server stack you select, it provides one or more workers per instance to run your application. Learn all about how to tune your workers per server and use an excellent new calculator to figure out your ideal set up in our new documentation! Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

Postgres Ireland: June 4, Engine Yard Dublin. Come and meet some Postgres backend developers based in Ireland, and discuss the recent landmark 9.2 release. We encourage participation from people of all levels of experience with Postgres - from people who aren’t current users, and would like to know more, right up to experienced users with large installations. Greg Stark, a long-time Postgres contributor and committer, will speak.

Magma Rails: June 5-7, Manzanillo, Mexico. MagmaRails is now MagmaConf!, one of the most important web development conferences in Mexico; with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Frontend and more web technologies sessions for developers and engineers that build cutting-edge web applications.

GoRuco: New York’s premier community-organized Ruby conference. Stop by the Engine Yard table and say hello!

Articles of Interest

Our inaugural developer’s conference, Distill, on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay, still has early bird tickets left. Hope to see you there!

Northwestern University’s engineering students are given dance lessons to help them have more balanced brains.

Fan favorite and lead AP support manager Chris Rigor shares his talking points from his presentation at Ruby Kaigi this week, in which he created a debian wheezy vagrant box with chef recipes to set up a rails app! And this was my favorite slide of the week, where Meagan Fisher demystifies design process at BTConf.