We have been chatting about our cloud computing platform (known internally as Project Zeus but to be official named later) a fair amount in the past few months.  We have talked about our features and it being truly designed for the enterprise – small and large.  We have not talked about how it was built.

Earlier this week, our development team at Relevance put up a blog post on their work on the web and mid tiers for the project.  This promises to be the first in a series on how to build a cloud computing platform.  At least, how Contegix built a cloud computing platform designed around our principles and requirements.

Read the post, and one will find a number of interesting jewels.  One thing might stick out as very interesting. While we are known for our Java hosting, our cloud was built using Ruby and Rails.  Relevance used JRuby in the mid-tier for  numerous reasons, including the VIJava library for VMware.  The web tier is pure Rails 2.3.2.  Since Contegix is one of the largest managed Rails hosting companies and has been for quite awhile (anyone miss the Apache+fcgi days?), this was a natural infrastructure for us to support.

More information coming about our cloud late next week.  Launch is quickly approaching!

NR Notify is a simple ruby based notification tool for New Relic RPM. With NR Notify you can add email and SMS notifications to your Ruby on Rails and Merb applications. By using the the New Relic API, NR Notify provides email and SMS notifications based off of your “Traffic Light” settings within New Relic.

Features:

• Multiple Email Support
• Multiple SMS Support
• Adjustable Alert Escalations Policies
• Supports Multiple Rails Applications
• YAML Configuration
• Adjustable Update Interval

New Relic Notify is easy to setup. All you need to do is adjust the config.yml to your liking and run the included Ruby script. However it is recommended that NR Notify is ran under a service manager such as daemontools or runit. This also requires a SMTP server to deliver the emails.

For more details on NR Notify please visit our project home:
http://code.contegix.com/wiki/display/NRN

For the project source please visit:
http://code.contegix.com/svn/NRN/trunk

In the past few months, nginx (pronounced “Engine X”) has become The Little Engine That Could. This is most evident in Rails deployments and in Zimbra 5, where it replaced perdition for IMAP/POP3 proxying. For Rails, it is typically replacing Apache 2.2 proxy_load_balancer as a front-end to Mongrel.

One of our engineers, Joe Williams, decided to put both system to the test with a Battle Royale. Check out the results.