Welcome to my XLsuite blog!
I'm François Beausoleil known for Piston and my Subversion Primer for Rails projects blog post.
This blog will be dedicated to my experience on working in and around XLsuite. I will talk mostly about technical issues. I'll let my friend, Riel, talk about the business and marketing side of things.
So, what's been happening on XLsuite ? If you aren't aware, XLsuite is a platform for managing your business online: product catalog, invoices, customer relationship, email, forums, etc. You name it, we probably have it, or it's in the works.
Lately, I have been more concerned with setting ourselves up with a stable base from which to grow on. That means using a good host. We ended up migrating to Amazon's EC2. And now that we're a couple of months into our hosting there, I would like to take this opportunity to talk about our infrastructure.
First off, requests come in from the cloud and hit our single Apache frontend web server which takes care of static files. Then we have two application servers, with 5 Mongrels each. We also have 2 servers handling what we call futures, but are essentially delayed tasks. If you ever worked with RailsCron, you know the implementation behind it. Finally, we have a master database server, as well as a slave, setup in a classic master-slave replication topology. All assets are stored on S3, and we redirect the browser there as needed.
Why do we redirect the browser to S3? Because we take your data security very seriously. Assets can also have security attached to them: authors can grant or deny access to specific groups and people. For that reason, we can't let the asset be served directly from S3: we have to authenticate the request first. If you are authorized, we redirect your browser to S3.
I agree, for public assets, it's overkill. At the moment, we don't have performance issues on that, but if it becomes a problem, that can be changed. Everything is a tradeoff, it seems!
Anyway, we've been very satisfied with our cluster so far, and we hope you enjoyed this little tidbit of our private garden.
** Update Dec 12th 2008 **
Since I've been asked several times, I'm adding that at the time of this post, we're using 6 small instances for our web, mongrel and slave DB instances, and we're using a large instance for our database server.
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