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The folks over at RailsEnvy (we sponsored a recent podcast of theirs) have put together The Ruby Hero Awards.
This is a great program designed to recognize the hard-working people in the Ruby and Rails communities who might otherwise not get as much exposure as their work deserves. Check out the site, nominate your Ruby hero, and also note that this application is running on Morph AppSpaces.
The Morph Application Platform, the first Platform-as-a-Service for Ruby on Rails, leverages Amazon Web Services for the deployment and delivery of Ruby on Rails applications. The technology behind the Morph Application Platform allows us to provide developers with an elastically scalable platform to deploy their Ruby on Rails applications to while keeping expense to a minimum. While the concept of a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is something we've covered before, the latter part about Amazon often brings up a lot of questions. Where the confusion often occurs has to do with how the Morph Application Platform interacts with Amazon Web Services and more specifically, how developers deploying to the MAP must interact with AWS. To be perfectly frank, we specifically reference Amazon because it is a well-known brand that people recognize. From a developer standpoint, however, you could deploy to the Morph Application Platform and never know that Amazon was even in the mix.. Essentially, in the truest sense of the Platform-as-a-Service philosophy, the Morph Application Platform abstracts the underlying architecture; in this case the Amazon EC2 architecture. Think of the Morph Application Platform as a "Virtualized Application Environment" where our abstraction layer is the next generation of virtualization at the infrastructure level. the MAP uses commodity software and intellectual property to build a completely seamless layer of services that product enterprise class deployment, delivery and management to applications.What this means is that when you deploy your application to the Morph Application Platform, you do not have to make any changes to your application and you never actually work directly with EC2. In fact, you don't have to work with any of the Amazon Web Services, though you can certainly leverage S3 or SQS directly for centralized object storage and queuing respectively. The key here is that you do not have to interact with AWS if you don?t want to.There are a number of reasons for this abstraction of the underlying technology. Other than keeping the details of what is happening under the hood away from the developer so they can focus on the core product, there is another big reason for this. Morph is not here to be a front-end for Amazon. Since we completely abstract the underlying infrastructure, we can add new grids as they come online and even spread your application across grids. We get to leverage multiple clouds for the redundancy benefits and the developer doesn't have to make any changes.It seems a lot of the confusion about how Morph leverages EC2 or how you as a developer leveraging the Morph Application Platform works with EC2 is due to the plethora of projects, talks, and blog posts about using Ruby on Rails and EC2. Most of the articles out there talk about using Rails as a front end for deploying EC2 images, something that is completely different that running a RoR application on an EC2 instance. Here are some of the resources from around the web on using Ruby on Rails and EC2:
Libraries and Projects
Talks and PresentationsBlog posts and ArticlesAs you can see, even with the continuous improvement of the EC2 product, the conclusion is definitely this: It is a lot of work to leverage EC2 as a server environment for your Ruby on Rails application.Just to put this all into perspective, EC2 has historically (since its launch just a few years ago) been used when computing power is needed on-demand. It is relatively trivial to "spin-up" instances to handle asynchronous processing, but to leverage EC2 for scalable web applications is a very different proposition. Add to that redundancy, load-balancing, databases, filesystem issues, etc. and you can see the value of a PaaS such as Morph Application Platform that leverages AWS while abstracting the underlying difficulties from the developer is necessary.There are commercial and open source projects that provide you with a pre-configured image to place on EC2 (Linux-based system with Ruby on Rails) to run your Rails applications on the ?cloud?. Unfortunately those are still not abstracted enough from EC2 for the average Ruby on Rails developer looking for a simple deployment environment. It is our MAP technology, the "Virtualized Application Environment", that is the abstraction layer that allows developers to focus on their core product and not worry about the underlying systems and to keep costs down far below what you would pay to deploy a dedicated EC2 instance just to host your small Rails application.
A quick follow-up on a post on our Asia blog about the GoRuCo 2008 ticket giveaway. Follow the instructions posted there, but also check out the announcement on the GoRuCo website. Morph is sponsoring the event and is excited to be a part of this great Ruby conference.Good luck and make sure you enter today!
On Tuesday, April 8th, 2008, TSOT, Inc. hosts their monthly Ruby on Rails Project Night for the Toronto, Ontario, Canada tech community. The highly anticipated event will be the fourth of its kind for TSOT, Inc., a local developer of scalable peer production networks. The company has seen a great turn out from Toronto's tech elite at past events and we hope this event will be even better.Doors open at 5:30pm and presentations begin at 6:00pm. This event is free but space is limited; to reserve your spot email corina.newby(at)tsotinc.com directly. Morph, by the way, is the official drink sponsor of the event. You can find out more in the official press release.We hope all of you Torontonian Rubyists have a great time!
On a rainy day in Orlando, Morph presented to an enthusiastic crowd of hackers, technologists, and creative types at BarCamp Orlando. In typical BarCamp fashion we presented our product without a lot of commercial overtones, introducing the crowd first to the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) concept and then to the Morph Application Platform and Morph AppSpaces; the first true PaaS for Ruby on Rails applications. You can find slides from the event, not just ours but all of the presenters, along with links to blogs, pictures, and more on the BarCamp Orlando wiki. Overall, BarCamp Orlando had a great vibe, was spread across great locations in the heart of Downtown Orlando, and was packed with great people with plenty of excitement for all-things technology. There is definitely a strong Ruby crowd in Orlando, and our sponsorship of the latest Rails Envy podcast leading into the event helped get people excited about Morph. If you haven't attended a BarCamp, and you are at all interested in the latest technology, find your local event and go. Just a note to Gregg and his crew. You did a great job with BarCamp Orlando and we are happy to have been a part of it. Thanks!
Morph sponsored and attended (and really enjoyed) the Mountain West Ruby Conference in Salt Lake City on March 28 and 29th. The one-track conference consisted of two full days of intense Ruby discussions. From Ruby internals and Domain Specific Languages, to working with Amazon Web Services from Ruby, the presentations were varied and interesting. The event was very well organized with about 200 people attending. Congratulations to the conference organizers and the speakers for putting together a very professional and very exciting event. We are definitely looking forward to next year's conference.
You can find a lot of information about the conference through these channels:
The buzz is building about the Morph Application Platform. On March 19, 2008, Information Week published an article about Morph Labs and our ground-breaking product the Morph Application Platform. The article does a great job of explaining the benefits of cloud computing in general and the Morph Application Platform in particular. This is a very good article that is spot-on with every point.
