Building the Cloud – More than Water & Hot Air
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!