Austin on Rails - September Meeting September 10, 2007

Scheduling Note
We will be meeting at our typical location for our monthly meetings (Frog Design at 8th and Congress). We will run the meeting roughly from 7PM-9PM, so please be on time. Also, please note that our September meeting is on Monday (directly after Lone Star conference is over). This meeting date was chosen to accommodate our visitor from Amazon's tight schedule.

Rails EC2 Plugin
Steve Odom revisits his ElasticRails plugin that makes it simple to deploy your Rails app to Amazon EC2.

Steve's hobby is creating rails applications that no one visits. Sites like smarkets.net, trivionomy.com, and quizical.net. He's also created a couple of rails plugins; s3cache and elasticrails. One day he hopes to create something popular so he can quit his dayjob. He can be reached at steve.odom at gmail.com

AWS + ROR = Development Bliss
Amazon spent ten years and over $2 billion developing a world-class technology and content platform that powers Amazon web sites for millions of customers. Most people think “Amazon.com” when they hear the word; however developers are excited to learn that there is a separate technology arm of the company, known as Amazon Web Services or AWS. Using AWS, developers can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology that powers Amazon’s retail business. AWS has now launched eleven services with open API’s for developers to build applications, with the result that over 265,000 developers have registered on Amazon’s developer site to create applications based on these services.

In this session, Jinesh Varia, Evangelist for Amazon web services, is going to provide an overview of some of the Amazon Web services and demo some cool apps that are built using Ruby on Rails. Additionally, We will see a demo of how a typical Rails application can built to “Auto-scale” that simply “listens” to incoming requests/second and makes a smart “educated guess” of how many more steady-state servers are needed to serve the increased load and actually automatically spawn that many virtualised instances, without any human intervention.

This session will highlight some of the newly launched features of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and newly launched Amazon Flexible Payment Service (Amazon FPS) and show how you can monetize your existing services.

As a Web Services Evangelist at Amazon, Jinesh Varia helps developers take advantage of disruptive technologies that are going to change the way we think about computer applications, and the way businesses compete. He is focused on furthering awareness of web services and often helps developers on 1:1 basis in implementing their own ideas using Amazon’s innovative services. Jinesh has over 7 years experience in XML and Web services and has worked with standard working groups in XBRL. Prior to joining Amazon as an evangelist, he held several positions in UBmatrix including Solutions Architect, Enterprise Team Lead and Software engineer, working on various XBRL-based financial services projects including ASP.NET based Call Modernization Project at FDIC. He was also lead developer at Penn State Data Center, Institute of Regional Affairs. Jinesh’s publications have been published in ACM and IEEE. Jinesh is originally from India and holds a Master’s degree in Information Systems from Penn State University. He plays tennis and loves to trek.

Socialization Practice
Drinks and what not to follow at Hickory Street. Don't miss it!

Official Website: http://austinonrails.org/articles/2007/09/03/meeting-monday-september-10th-7pm