gistfile1.txt

Proposal title: AWS Deployment with Rubber
==============


Description (400 characters - 65 words):
=======================================

Cloud computing has made computing at scale available to everyone.  Cloud computing is not without its pitfalls, however.  Overcoming these relies on following the deployment best practices discovered through years of trial and error.  The Rubber framework aims to codify some of these best practices and help you build and manage your real world cloud deployment in a practical manner.


Session type: 45 min. conference session
============


Abstract:
========

The Amazon Web Services platform (AWS) is one of the easiest and most reliable ways to get going with cloud computing, and has one of the richest APIs available for fulfilling your deployment needs.  Rubber is a role-based deployment framework built on top of Capistrano that simplifies the lifecycle and provisioning of EC2 instances and other AWS services (EBS, S3, etc).  In this talk you'll learn some of the more important best practices for building and managing a cluster, using Rubber as the means for building out common and complex applications stacks rapidly on AWS.  For example,

The cloud is transient.  Your deployment needs to plan for failure.  Encoding your deployment into reusable recipes makes it easy for you to add redundancy by having multiple nodes of the same type.  Repeatable provisioning also makes it easy to recreate a node when it does fail.  We'll show how Rubber helps with this and much more by providing recipes, monitoring, and convenient integration into AWS features like S3, EBS, and Elastic IPs.

The cloud can scale. By using roles to define your cluster you can scale just the pieces that need it, as much as they need it.  Scaling inwards can be just as important as out, as it lets you have true on-demand staging environments that match your production layout.  We'll show you how to use Rubber to easily scale outwards for production and inwards for peace of mind.

The cloud needs innovation.  The landscape is evolving rapidly, and needs innovative solutions to new problems.  If your business needs a custom solution, you shouldn't be held hostage by your framework.  We'll show you how you can easily use Rubber to get up and running quickly and to customize your stack as needed.

By the end of the talk you should have a good understanding of how AWS can be helpful for your application and how to use Rubber to build out your deployment stack in less than 30 minutes.  Perhaps the best part is you can employ Rubber piecemeal with your existing deployment process since it's an add-on rather than a replacement for Capistrano, significantly reducing the cost of migrating.

Further reading:

Rubber wiki - http://wiki.github.com/wr0ngway/rubber/
Scaling Rails podcast - http://blog.envylabs.com/2009/11/scaling-rails-part-3/


Skill Level of this session: advanced 
===========================


What knowledge/skills should attendees have in order to get the most from this session?
=======================================================================================

Attendees should be familiar with using Capistrano for deployment and should have a basic idea of what cloud computing is.