We’ve been working on an off-site backup solution that ties Engine Yard to Amazon’s S3 service.

Database backups run every 4 hours, moving the newest to S3 and removing the oldest from S3 automatically. S3 houses a 1-week rolling backup of our customers’ MySQL database contents.

This means that even if a meteor strikes our data center, our customers’ up-to-date db contents will exist elsewhere.

We’re developing similar solutions for file system contents and SVN contents, as well.

O’Reilly and Associates has just published and made available my first commercial publishing effort in 26 years.

It discusses how to use Capistrano, with emphasis on how it fits into application development.

It’s a quick 67 page read, and I hope it’s useful to folks trying to get up and running with modern deployment techniques.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/railsapp/

Have fun, gentle readers!

I saw this job posting from VeriSign. It was posted on Nov. 29 and provides an example of where Rails is headed:

VeriSign’s starting words:

We are starting a common unified language initiative.
We view Ruby on Rails playing a great role in that initiative.

Yet another piece of good news for Rails adoption by large organizations.

Full posting here, if you want to see it:

http://jobs.rubynow.com/jobs/show/729

… you really want to be ready :-).

This is some chatter inside Engine Yard on a Saturday morning (today):

Lance: “Hey, [name removed until public] is launching this weekend and should get written up in the NY Times, right? Just checking.”

Ezra: “I got them all live yesterday. They are running fine. We just need to watch traffic so we can add slices if they need. They’re moving to 3 slices tonight, just to be safe. I asked them to tell us in advance before the NY Times article runs and they’ll definitely work closely with us on that.”

We’re happy to help our customers succeed – it’s our job!

Hi,

Happy Thanksgiving to our US customers. And to everyone (in the US or not), we send well wishes to you and your loved ones.

I just took a break from gingerbread cookies and looked at our customer list. We have 30 customers, and we’re over that number if we include some slices we’ve provided to help various community efforts.

That’s not a big number in the regular hosting world, but it’s big to us. It seems like just yesterday that we had 3 customers, and now we’re at 10X that number. Those first few customers were in September & October (and very appreciated!), so we’re actually growing pretty quickly.

Thanks to all of you for working with us. Have a good one!

— Lance