Ryan Tomayko and I chat it up with Mike Malloy on New Relic’s RailsLab videos.

We’ve launched our pricing.

My tech talk at Pivotal Labs, describing the Heroku internals and next generation app deployment in general. This talk was given last December, and we’ve added a lot of features since then - for example, we now have a binary gems solution. But the core architecture described in the video remains accurate.

A quick script to export a database table to CSV is below. Drop into lib/tasks/export.rake (Rails), or directly into your Rakefile, then call at the command line:

Personal cloud computing - running multiple virtualized machines (Xen, OpenVZ, VMWare, etc) on your desktop or a single personal server - may be an emerging pattern. Vidar Hokstad writes about his setup, in which he partitions scratchpad machines (for play and experimentation) from long-term machines (for backups and archives).

The new Heroku is instant Ruby deployment with a pure Git workflow. In my estimation, there is no faster or easier way to get a Ruby web app online. We’re finally making good on our tagline: “Never think about servers or hosting again.”

I’ve always liked to build systems with a bunch of small apps that talk to each other through various protocols. Orion and I built TrustCommerce in this manner, and that gave it some pretty impressive fault-tolerance and scalability.

Rack is one of the most important developments in the Ruby web space in the past year. I suspect it’s been slow to get attention because the benefits are a bit subtle. Witness the Rails core team being confused about Rack just a few months ago. So if you don’t get what the deal is with Rack, don’t feel bad - you’re in good company.

Whew, I think my brain has finally returned from its liquified state after Railsconf. Last year the conference felt like a vacation, since all I did was attend. This year, with all the speaking and booth-manning and meetings, it was pretty grueling.

Places you’ll find me at Railsconf this year:

• Giving my talk about custom Nginx modules on Saturday afternoon. The talk has evolved quite a bit since I wrote the description, so expect some broader topics, like why I think HTTP is the critical enabling protocol in the era of Rails and cloud computing.
• Attending the Heroku product talk, in which we propose why you may never need to think about servers or hosting again. This is inconveniently scheduled immediately before my session talk, so I’ll have to duck out partway through.
• Signing books along with the other recipe contributors to Mike Clark’s Advanced Rails Recipes at the Powell’s Books booth at the lunch break on Friday.
• Hanging around our booth, where I intend to hack on Heroku and my open source projects, listen in on Geoffrey Grosenbach's podcast interviews, and meet everyone that stops by. So… stop by! :)

During a presentation I gave last month, someone asked what Heroku plans to do about the many different versions of Rails and Ruby, not to mention choices on components like database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite) or app server (Mongrel, Thin, Ebb).