pragmatic rails architecture [sf rails, 24 apr 14]

rainforest @rainforestqa

Pragmatic Rails Architecture

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Rainforest

Human powered QA SaaS

Enables ‘Continuous QA’

Built for cross-functional teams

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Us

Team of 6 in SoMa

All developers

YC S12

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What is pragmatism?

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Practical applications of X

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What do I mean by “practical”

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Impractical

Things breaking

Inconsistency

Complexity

Manual intervention

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Practical

Simple

Works

Hands off

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What do I mean by “architecture”?

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The parts of your stack that you can’t remove without breaking

things

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So…how?

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Understand your choices

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Understand your tradeoffs

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All these matter

Hosting

Code (Gems + your code)

Services

Testing

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Hosting

Understand what your team is capable of

what’s important?

Co-lo / Dedicated

AWS / VPS

Heroku / PaaS

Co-lo / Dedicated

AWS / VPS

>>> Heroku / PaaS <<<

–John Nunemaker

“You're An Idiot For Not Using Heroku.”

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Code

Single responsibility principle

Multiple apps - learn when to split

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Gems

Always check for gems

Use the maintained ones

Fix the unmaintained ones

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Picking Gems; quick guide

Is it active?

Old pull requests?

Read the code

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Picking gems; quick guide

active?

read the code

I can has tests?

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Services

Core: datastore, queuing

External: email service, monitoring, etc

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Datastore (1/2)

Understand your use-case

Pick one your team understands

Generally, avoid trends

If not understood, research weaknesses

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Datastore 2/2

Keep to the standards: MySQL / Postgres

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External services

Use them where not your core

Generally cheaper + better + simpler

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Queuing

QueueClassic

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Extra stuff

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Monitoring

Your service - web, db, queue size, etc

External services - stripe.js? heroku? aws?

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Deployment + CI

You should do this

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Testing

Importance, imho:

#1 cover main flows for the user

#2 integration + front end regressions

#3 unit tests

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Conclusion

understand your tradeoffs

the least reliable part of your stack = your reliability

monitor things

rainforest @rainforestqa

Questions?@rainforestqa

@rhs