We are having an informal happy hour tonight at Slice Pizza in Atlanta for Rails Machine friends, customers, vendors, and Atlanta Rubyists. Pizza and beer (or sweet tea) will be provided.
I am in Atlanta for a few days doing pointy-haired boss stuff and would love to meet up.
What: Rails Machine Happy Hour
When: Friday, February 1. 6pm-??
Where: Slice Pizza (bar side) [map]
1025 Howell Mill Rd
Atlanta, GA 30318
(404) 817-7153
Hope to see you there!
If you’re in the southeast, be sure to boogie on down to acts_as_conference in Orlando. You’ll get to meet lots of great people, listen to talks, and come to a fabulous Rails Machine party!
On Friday night, we’ll be hosting free beer and appetizers in the Pool Room at the Ale House on Kirkland following Dan Benjamin’s keynote.
Yesterday, we placed our orders for the give one, get one program from One Laptop Per Child. If you haven’t ordered yours, you only have a few more weeks!
One of the fun things about living in a cozy-sized town is that occasionally I get asked to speak to local groups about the internet and related matters. For the second time, I was asked to speak to Leadership Savannah during a panel on information and technology. The panel also included Murray Wilson of tps, Jim Goodlett of Morris Technology, and Dan Suwyn of Rapid Change.
Last year I spoke on Web 2.0ish kinds of stuff, so this year I decided to change up the style and content. The talk presented the strategies used by small internet companies that are successful and competitive despite their size and lack of huge sums of funding.
My focus on small, home-grown tactical companies was a nice contrast to a presentation by Jason Burr from ATDC who adeptly represented the more traditional approach of marrying giant sacks of VC with ideas from research institutes. Hopefully the class gained some insight from both approaches in the context of the future of our fair city.
Speaking of VC, Jim mentioned a notable Machinist, thefunded.com, as a useful resource for those looking to explore funding options. TheFunded is built and maintained by the singular and mysterious Founding Member and hosted on a Rails Machine. This is a fine example of the power of small teams.
The presentation was rather short, but has some nice pictures. Take a look.
We (my wife and I) arrived in Berlin last night and went over to brautwurst on rails. It was a fun event with good beer and great brats. I always looking catching up with people that I only seem to see at conferences.
Today, we explored some of the city and did the tourist thing a bit, but more importantly tried to get a peak at life in Berlin. There’s something very vibrant about the city and it appeals to me greatly. Standing on the cobblestone marking where the wall used to be gave me great feeling about how the cultural landscape can morph with the will of the people.
On Wednesday night, I would like to invite all Machinists in Berlin out for a customer appreciation dinner. Please RSVP to bradley at railsmachine dot com. Thanks!
Last night I arrived in beautiful Tucson, Arizona for the KVM Forum 2007. This is the first gathering of the community surrounding the Kernel-based Virtual Machine project. The agenda is impressive with speakers from the development team, Intel, IBM, AMD, and others. The event is presented by Qumranet, the company supporting the KVM open source project.
As you may remember, I mentioned KVM in this article. Although Rails Machine’s virtualization infrastructure is based on Xen and CentOS, my local development environment is powered by Ubuntu and KVM (on a Thinkpad X60s and a home built Core 2 Quad).
So, why is KVM different? It leverages the hardware virtualization support in recent processors and uses the linux kernel as the hypervisor. This approach leads to a small implementation and easy integration. You can get up and running with KVM with simple package install commands on Ubuntu. It does not require an entire toolset that reimplements the functions of the operating system. For example, with KVM you can use the standard linux process tools like ‘ps’ and ‘top’ to manage virtual server processes. Read more about it in the kvm whitepaper.
KVM development is moving at a blistering pace. The patchset was introduced in October 2006 and merged into the kernel in December. With less than a year of development, the KVM team has added features and capabilities that has taken others much longer. Combined with the commitment to Linux and open source, KVM has an exciting future ahead.
My talk on deploying Rails on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn had a good turnout. Given the size of the conference, it was great to see the number of people interested in Rails. You can find the slides here. I also had some nice discussions with folks from Canonical about Rails support in Ubuntu. I really apprieciate their enthusiasm about the future of Ubuntu server and look forward to rolling out some virtual servers shortly.
On Sunday, I was was able to spend a few minutes with Luke Kanies and spoke with him about Puppet. I think there are some interesting possibilities on how we could integrate Puppet into our default virtual machine images to provide easy access for customers to recipes for different kinds of common installs like mod_dav_svn, Trac, PHP, etc. Stay tuned for more in this area.
Tonight I’ll head over to FOSCON presented by PDX.rb.
In a few minutes, I’m headed off to hear the opening keynotes for Ubuntu Live. If you’re also at the conference or in Portland for OSCON, shoot me an email and we’ll grab a beer! I also have some t-shirts if you didn’t get one at RailsConf.
As requested, here are the slides for my RailsConf session on virtual clusters.
The journey to Portland has begun. The cross country flight is a bit long, but it will give me a chance to get going on a Cap2 version of the RM gem. I’m killing a few hours in the Atlanta airport after the short flight from Savannah.
In addition to the reception, everyone is invited to join us for lunch, dinner, drinks, hackfests, and other impromptu events. I encourage you to utilize the Campfire room to connect with us and other Machinists. If you don’t have an account, request one and I’ll invite you.
On Saturday, don’t oversleep and miss my session at 10:45am about virtual clusters.
If “free food and beer” wasn’t enough to get you to the reception, the menu includes fruit, cheese, cedar plank salmon, deviled eggs with caviar, pork loin, and roast turkey. There will also be a few kegs of Bridgeport ale to wash it all down. If you’re lucky, you might walk away with an iPod Nano, an iced-out RAILS goblet, or some free hosting. Remember, if you are not a customer, you will need a ticket as space is limited for non-customers. Find me (or my wife) during the conference for your ticket.
A few times a week I receive requests for help with developing applications. If you are a current customer and have some free time, your fellow Machinists need your help! Please leave your information in a comment if you are available for hire.
This month Steve Wilson joined the Machine full time. Previously, he had be working for us part-time. Steve (aka SecretSteve) has over 10 years of experience in programming and system administration. He brings valuable skills to the Machine that not only help us increase our quality of service, but also develop some new services that will be announced soon. Welcome to the Machine!
We are also looking for one or two more team members to work either full or part-time. These positions are for direct customer support. Responsibilities include handling support requests, deploying new servers, writing documentation, and developing new tools for customers. This position requires good communication skills and a broad range of interests. Please email your availability and resume to bradley at railsmachine.
We’ve been very busy with upgrading our data center facilities and I would like to share some of the excitement of the past month.
Last week we installed a new cabinet at Internap in Atlanta. In addition to our typical hosting servers, we’ve installed a few units from Coraid and hardware load balancers from Coyote Point. This week we’ve been working on a six server cluster for one of EastMedia’s clients as well as deploying orders for the Xen Machine special that I announced a few weeks ago.
In few days, I’ll be adding a new plan that features a redundant configuration of virtual servers with hardware load balancing and shared SAN storage. This plan will start at $450/month for two 1GB servers at Internap.
At the AtlantaNAP, we added a third cabinet for new servers. We recently placed an order for a 200 sqft private cage. This cage will provide us a more controlled working environment and lots of room to grow. We will begin installing racks shortly.
This new space will support our new yet-to-be announced Xen Machine plans (dedicated server running Xen) for those that like the power of Xen, but need dedicated hardware resources for your virtual clusters.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
In lieu of a fancy marketing booth, we decided to throw a reception for our customers and friends during RailsConf. On Saturday evening from 6:30 – 8:30 pm, we will be serving hors d’oeuvres and local microbrew at the Skyroom in the Red Lion hotel across from the convention center.
Please plan on stopping by for some cedar plank salmon, good brew, and conversation with other Machinists. We will be giving away door prizes including an iPod Nano, RAILS crunk goblet, and hosting accounts. Topfunky has also generously donated some Peepcode t-shirts to give away. In addition, all attendees will receive a Rails Machine t-shirt and a Peepcode coupon!
All customers are invited and over 60 have responded so far! It should be a great event. If you are not a customer, but would like to join the fun, look for me during the conference to get your ticket. There is limited availability so don’t wait until the last minute. You don’t want to miss it!
PS – If you need a ticket to RailsConf, a few of your fellow Machinists are looking to part with theirs. Contact me for more information.
Dear Machinists:
As I promised, I’ve finally obtained information on the network outages that have been affecting us for the past few months. This state of the machine describes our data center troubles and my plan to rectify them.
For context, I have two cabinets of servers with SiteSouth who has a large private cage in the AtlantaNAP. The AtlantaNAP provides secure space, power, network access, and cooling to SiteSouth. SiteSouth provides those four necessary services to Rails Machine. SiteSouth is one of the largest providers within AtlantaNAP. Rails Machine owns its hardware which is manufactured by Cisco, Supermicro, and APC.
Over the past few days, I’ve spoken with the owners of both SiteSouth and the AtlantaNAP. Unfortunately, I’ve received two different descriptions of the problems. Given this discrepancy, it is difficult for me to say what exactly the issues are. The only facts that I have is that there have been several outages of network connectivity between the AtlantaNAP and Rails Machine via SiteSouth. Given the unusual nature of this situation, I can not describe the precise issues and their resolutions. What I can say is that situation is not acceptable and I am working immediately to resolve it.
At this point, my plan is to give you a choice. I would like to split Rails Machine across two data centers. Since the beginning of the network issues a month ago, I’ve been in discussions with several data centers. I have not made a final decision, but I will shortly. I want to make sure that my decisions will restore a high quality of service as quickly as possible.
One option is to move into another space in the AtlantaNAP. This can happen quickly and everyone will be able to keep their IP addresses. The migration should require minimal downtime and can be done during low periods of traffic for your sites.
At the same time, we will install service in another data center. I have not made a final decision, but the current top choice is well known and used by a number of high profile companies. Those customers that wish can migrate to this facility. The downside is that your IP address will change and require some extra downtime. In addition, it will be possible for us to offer data center redundancy. We will work with you during the migration to make it as smooth and seamless as possible.
Specifics and a time line will be forth coming for both data center migrations. It is a significant undertaking and will require time to plan and execute. I am working as fast as I can to evaluate the options and purchase the necessary hardware to make for a smooth transition. Please watch the blog and your inbox for more details in the next week.
During the two outages many of you provided some excellent feedback on how we can improve our communications with you. As announced earlier, I have already launched a server status page with an independent monitoring service. In addition, I am correcting some issues with being able to easily send email notifications to customers who are affected by a server or network outage. In the future, we will be announcing a comprehensive monitoring package for your VPS that will allow you to keep a watchful eye on your servers’ health and connectivity.
Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about these plans. Since Rails Machine began, I have worked hard to provide a high quality service for Rails hosting. I am sorry that the recent events have had a significant impact on that goal. I appreciate your understanding and patience.
Sincerely,
Bradley Taylor
Owner, Rails Machine
PS. Thanks to everyone who hung out in the Campfire room! It made the waiting somewhat less torturous. If you still don’t have a Campfire account, please request one via the support system.
