This is my keynote from MerbCamp, where I talk about merb past and present as well as introduce nanite a self assembling cluster of ruby processes

2. Merb
then and now
Ezra Zygmuntowicz
http://engineyard.com

3. Merb
Then
Sept 21st 2006
http://pastie.org/14416
AKA Baby Merb

4. Merb Now
• merb-core
• merb-action-args • merb-haml
• merb-assets • merb-helpers
• merb-auth • merb-jquery
• merb-builder • merb-mailer
• merb-cache • merb-parts
• merb-gen • merb-slices

5. Core Tenets of Merb

6. Merb should be fast
(no code is faster then no code)

7. Merb should be
memory efficient

8. Merb code should be
as simple as possible

9. Merb should be
modular

10. Merb should be easy to
grok and extend
(by hackers for hackers)

11. Merb should focus on
the application server
as well as the web
framework

12. Merb should get out of
your way and be
*flexible*

13. Most Importantly
Merb should be an
experimentation
ground

14. Why not just work on
rails?

15. Monoculture is bad

16. Everyone wins when
there is competition

17. Lot’s of merb’s lessons
can be applied back to
rails

18. Merb-1.0RC drops
tomorrow!
Huge thanks to the
community and all
contributors

19. merb-stack: training wheels
included

20. Now with that out of
the way...

21. Introducing Nanite

22. Nanite is a new way of
building scalable
backends for web apps

23. Built around RabbitMQ
• Written in erlang, clusterable, highly
scalable, fast as hell.
• AMQP protocol provides many nice
features
• Transient, Persistent and Transactional
semantics

24. <3 RabbitMQ

25. Nanite agents
consist of multiple Actors

26. Nanite agents advertise
their services and status
Feeds#crawl
advertises:
/feeds/crawl
Load average is advertised
as default status

27. Nanite Mappers
Track nanites and their advertised services and status
Can do dispatch based on a number of factors
Run inside your Merb or Rails app
State of all nanites is replicated across all mappers

28. Multiple Dispatch
Styles

29. Least loaded dispatch
and the fitness function

30. Agents ping the mapper exchange
every @ping_time seconds.
Mappers track the state of all
nanites and remove them from
mapping if they haven’t reported in
within a timeout

31. Nanite gives us:
• Presence, we know when nanites are ready
for requests or not.
• Self assembly, nanites can come and go and
can run anywhere with zero configuration
in the mappers.
• Dispatch based on load or any fitness
function that suits your app
• Easily take advantage of cloud

32. File Streaming

33. Nanite makes it easy to
scale web app backends
Git it on GitHub:
http://github.com/ezmobius/nanite

34. Questions?