In this brief interview, Satish Talim of RubyLearning talks to Paul Barry of USA, winner of the eighth Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies.

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Over the past few months I've been working on a major new version of Ernie, the RPC server I wrote to power GitHub's sharded file server architecture. As a reminder, Ernie is an Erlang/Ruby hybrid BERT-RPC server (packaged as a Rubygem) that let's you expose Ruby modules as an RPC service. It spawns, manages, and load balances between a set of Ruby processes that allow access to the Git repositories.

A major part of our work behind the scenes is about improving our internal processes and, whenever possible, automating tasks. To this end we have a number of systems that need to communicate with each other.

The Control Panel that you may be familiar with uses Delayed Job. This is a Rails-specific gem that uses the database as a queue, with a nicely packaged worker process that handles messages as they arrive. Because the Control Panel only ever talks to Rails from Rails, this worked extremely well.

Now that things have settled down from the move to Rackspace, I wanted to take some time to go over the architectural changes that we’ve made in order to bring you a speedier, more scalable GitHub.