episode
47
Ezra Zygmuntowicz
4 CommentsAdam and I visited the posh South Park Engine Yard office to talk with Ezra Zygmuntowicz. We covered hosting, managing open source, and even a bit about writing a book.
shownotes
- Ezra was a glass artist during the 90’s
- Yakima Herald was Ezra’s start in rails and deployment
- February 2006, they co-founded Engine Yard
- EY employs 65 people on 4 continents, providing 24×7 coverage
- Engine Yard has a data center on the east coast and west coast
- EY has two sides to the company, hosting and open source development
- Jamie van Dyke has been working on Samurai
- They hired Evan to work full time on Rubinius
- Ezra didn’t see a point for mod_rails for EY clients
- A number of clients are using Thin (including us now)
- Mod_rails didn’t support rack (at the time of the interview), but now does!
- Ezra is backporting Merb rack stuff to Rails
- DHH likes to call things “Highly optimized pieces of code”
- Ezra – “It is hard to let go and not touch every piece of the business as the startup grows”
- Working on an open source that EY sponsors is a good way to get noticed
- Matt Palmer rewrote part of SSHD to make github work in a more stable fashion
- Merb started as a small hack to easily deploy small sites
- Merb and Rubinius have an open commit bit policy, just submit a couple good patches and you can get full access
- Git changes open source projects to be more survival of the fittest
- Github has helped even get back changes for Josh’s own project, Signal Wiki
- Merb and Rubinius have highly active IRC channels and mailing lists
- Setting up guidelines for commits and documentation are key to a big project being successful
- Ugly code breeds ugly code
- No code is faster than no code
- Ezra didn’t fork the ruby web community!
- A merb/rails performance battle can only benefit the user bases of each
- Even with the open commit bit, you still have to promote your philosophies and let people know your roadmap
- Engine Yard is seeing tons of growth from large companies and solid growth from startups too
- Matz and the core ruby team agreed to use RubySpec from Rubinius to have a new test/spec to test Ruby interpreters against
- EY cluster is a 48U rack with six 24-disk SANs, 18 compute nodes each with 32gb of Ram and 8 CPUs
- Each EY machine boots off a USB thumb drive which mounts the SAN disks
- This allows them to move the thumb drive and then can spin a client back up on the fly
- They suggest two slices, so you can do incremental updates, etc
- They use GFS to let the slices share the same files (supports 16 slices)
- The mysql servers are tuned by outside experts, with weekly reporting on performance
- Tastyplanner is hosted at Engine Yard
- Tastyplanner used the rails default joins/includes and killed all our mongrels on Rails (via memory consumption)
- Even though EY has 2000+ slices, they all use the same “stack” and that allows them to easily debug/find issues quickly
- Ezra reads HackerNews/Ycombinator, but the volume is getting crazy to follow everything else
- Ezra likes The Pragamtic Programmer for a book
- Ezra has his own book! He thought writing was a bit tough, though
- We almost got our super secret info! Darn Ezra!
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Thanks Shnalla...
The next episode is slated to be a deep interview with Kevin Marks from Google. He works on the OpenSocial front and is one of the driving forces behind microformats.org. The interview delves deep into Microformats, OAuth, the OpenSocial API, and more...
The planned publish date is August 1st. Thanks for listening!