Phoenix Rails (February)

February 20th, 2008

This is a recap of last nights Phoenix Rails meeting for those that may have missed it or who attended but are looking for links from the discussion. I had originally written this and not saved it, my Macbook failed me with the famous command-tab freeze lockup and all was lost. So if this version sucks I apologize in advance.

The social hour started early with much nostalgia on early computer animation. There was talk about the early days of Pixar and how Silicon Graphics was one of the one viable hardware choices. The talk began to meander to Smalltalk at Xerox PARC and how to buy one of those machines on eBay. People continued to trickle in as the conversation progressed each adding their own experiences.

At 7pm Marc (with a “c”) Chung of OpenRain fired up the projector and started to give his presentation on Amazon’s EC2 Platform to a full house. He gave a nice overview of what EC2 is and how to create new instances and manage them. He demoed a great ruby gem for ec2 that has a full ec2 shell called ec2sh. There is a good article describing its use.

Next Marc fired up several EC2 instances and demoed a few application using MPI Ruby a ruby implementation of the Message Passing Interface Standard. This part of the presentation was fascinating and show the potential of EC2 for distributed applications and platforms like MPI Ruby and ERLANG.

Marc did a great job conveying the risks, limitations and frustrations that OpenRain has realized during the exploration of EC2. There was a great question and answer session comparing various services and functionality. Overall, there was a general sentiment that cloud computing is really just starting and that limitations are being overcoming daily. Additionally other Amazon Web Services like Mechanical Turk, S3 and SimpleDB were discussed.

There was mention that Mountain West Ruby Conf and Gotham Ruby Conf were both on the horizon.

After the meeting 10 or so attendees headed down to Churchill’s Pub and Grill for more conversation. Everyone was into their conversation that we ended up helping shut Churchhill’s down for the night. :)

I wanted to shout out to Bryan Williams of City Tech visiting all the way from Chicago, IL.

Additionally if you are just getting started with Amazon Web Services and Ruby you might to check out an Introduction to AWS for Ruby Developers

You should be able to find audio of the event shortly on Rubyology.

And Less Allan, yes I was rocking the SVN up bitches shirt. It got lots of great comments!