Efficiently provision your Rails stack, deploy your applications and manage your production environment with Ansible.
„Screw it! — Moving my Rails app to production takes more time than developing it!“
Your Rails application is the heart of your business. Built with utmost care, adhering to best practices and tested extensively. You trust your codebase and you can hardly await your first customers.
But before you can lean back and monitor your dashboard for incoming sales, there is an intermediate step you postponed for as long as possible: Moving your application from your development machine into the wild.
You already tried hosting your application with a PaaS like Heroku, EngineYard or Ninefold only to find out that they do not quite cut it for you:
You are on a point where you have outgrown hosting with a PaaS and realize that running your own infrastructure is the way to go.
But there is a wealth of information to digest before you are even able to provision a Rails stack and a lot of questions need to be answered.
„Moving to production defeats Rails' agility in minutes.“
Picture yourself having all the needed information to spin up a server from the ground up — without needing to hunt down every tiny drip of wisdom scathered around the web — plus a dedicated workflow to turn this information into a blueprint to apply to any bare naked machine:
You application development reaches a whole new level:
„There will no longer be a difference between running your app locally and serving it to your customers.“
The problem is gathering all the necessary knowledge, most of which is burried inside of half-assed blog posts and outdated tutorials. Finding and evaluating this information is demoralizing and takes days, weeks or even months of trial-and-error — time you would rather spend on developing awesome products for your customers.
Unfortunately, up until a few years ago years there has not been a single resource providing you with distilled information on how to efficiently build your environment in such a way.
Then there was. And now it is back in its awesome third edition.
Efficient Rails DevOps is the result of more than a decade of experience releasing Rails applications and reliably running them in production.
It covers the most efficient approach to serving Rails applications for small businesses, bootstrappers and enthusiasts.
This third edition of Efficient Rails DevOps is a complete rewrite of the already refined second edition, teaching the process that has served me perfectly as long as I can think of in powering every Ruby-based web application I built in the last 14 years.
It incorporates valuable feedback from readers as well as recent changes and additions to the Rails world and covers (among other things):
By building a reusable and versioned playbook you'll be able to seamlessly switch between staging and production environments, allowing you to test out new features of your application in an isolated environment to eliminate the fear of breaking something when pushing to production.
Along the way, you'll demistify the inner workings of a Rails server. Knowing exactly what needs to be done makes switching technologies easy — every hosting approach builds on this knowledge after all (no matter if it involves a physical server, a virtual machine or a container).
You'll free up precious time to concentrate on building awesome products for your customers instead of constantly struggling with deceptive error messages or unexplainable HTTP 500s.
Watch a small screencast of a typical Rails deployment which usually stays below 20 seconds (depending on whether database migrations need to be run and whether changes on the application's assets have been made).
I spent years making Efficient Rails DevOps the definitive guide on the subject, so I'm quite biased. Fortunately, you do not have to believe me that this book will forever change your view on Rails operations.
This is what people who already read it think:
Years ago, I spent 2 weeks and literally thousands of dollars of productive time learning by trial and error (many, many errors!) how to automate our server provisioning and Rails application deployment with Ansible.
If Michael had written his book sooner, I could have set up the same automation in an afternoon …
If you’re looking on migrating away from expensive black box PaaS or from wonky shell scripts, get this book.
This book was instrumental in helping our company effectively use Ansible to automate and orchestrate all our client's infrastructure. It's an invaluable resource, and has paid dividends many times over.
Unreservedly recommended!
Thanks for a great book!
I've read it cover-to-cover already. I've been deploying Rails applications for 3 years and I have picked up a bunch of tricks, both large and small, that I hadn't learned on my own.
To me, it's clear that this book will save developers HOURS of time and TONS of frustration, trying to figure out what they did wrong. I especially like how you tackled all security issues and explained why you did what you did. Top that with the fact that this is a bulletproof, foolproof process that's been refined over the course of 10 years and you've got a robust sure-fire method for deploying Rails apps.
This book is a piece of gold and a must-have for anyone doing DevOps. You need to get that into the hands of the people who actually need it.
I loved the book.
It was easy to follow and concise. It helped me greatly in automating some of our infrastructure setup and gave very helpful practical examples of how to use Ansible.
I think it provides a much needed resource for a neglected area of tech.
This is an excellent product.
It's been great for me getting a client off Heroku. It's in such great detail, which is helpful for me as a complete DevOps beginner.
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You may buy the book with your credit card (your charge will appear as "Efficient Rails DevOps" on your card statement). Apart from your email address, I do not collect any of the data you enter into the payment form.
Efficient Rails DevOps is not about developing Rails applications (so your Rails developing experience does not matter) — it is about operating them. In this regard, it is cool if you are an absolute DevOps beginner — minimal Linux knowledge really is enough to work through the book.
When you should grab a copy:
When you should leave quickly:
My name is Michael Trojanek and I have been building Rails applications in my spare time as well as managing Linux servers in my dayjob for 16 years.
I maintain a mailing list with hundreds of members receiving content on Rails DevOps and Bootstrapping and I am a most-viewed writer on Quora.
You can follow me on Twitter or learn more about me and my products on my website.
