Ruby is commonly associated with the frameworks (Rails, RSpec, and many others) that it enabled, but it is much more than that. The same ideology and design principles that popularized the language at the start are also the reason why it is being currently ported to a variety of alternative platforms: JVM, Objective-C, Smalltalk VM and Microsoft’s DLR.

Episode #096. Dan Benjamin (Playgrounder, Hivelogic) is back this week. We each had some background noise and an awkward moment. But it’s funny.

One of the power user features of Engine Yard Cloud is the ability to use custom Chef recipes to install or configure anything that can run on Gentoo Linux that we have not already automated as part of the platform. This allows for extensive customizations of your environments and empowers you to run virtually all custom software you might need.

Let’s start by talking about one of the tools you’ll want to strongly consider using as part of the Chef process: Redis.

We’ve been pretty busy on the blog this summer reviewing some of the interesting technologies that the Ruby and Rails worlds are working with. We tried to mix in some introductory materials and some more advanced ones. In case you missed them, we thought we’d do a quick review, particularly since we’ve had quite an increase in blog readership over the Summer.

Most of today’s up and coming key-value stores are more than just simple key-value stores. You saw this when we looked at Tokyo Cabinet which, in addition to simple key-value capabilities, adds more sophisticated abilities, such as database-like tables. In this post we’ll look at Cassandra — a modern key-value store that continues this trend. Cassandra was originally developed by Facebook and released to open source last year.