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The video equipment rental cost is paid for by PeepCode.
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Hello, I'm Francis Sullivan, the CTO and co-founder of a company here in Austin called Spiceworks.
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Today, I will talk about some of the lessons we have learned and share tips on using Ruby and Ruby on Rails over the last few years.
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The agenda will include a brief overview of our product—we're not trying to sell our product, as we don’t charge for it—so there’s no reason for that.
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I will then cover some interesting topics that you may or may not find interesting; however, since I find them interesting, I will be discussing them.
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I will talk about updating remote installations, as we have numerous installations in the field. We have implemented logic to keep these installations up-to-date with our most recent deployments.
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Next, I will briefly cover the performance of Ruby on Windows. I will walk you through a very basic example of how we avoid deadlocks in certain situations.
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Then, I will introduce an extension we wrote that allows us to use Active Record for tracking purposes.
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Finally, I will discuss the tweaks we've implemented on our network scanner to make it run faster.
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Quick show of hands: how many people here are from Austin? I can't tell you how amazing it is to see this because, three years ago when we started Spiceworks, I hardly knew what Ruby was.
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So, can you hear me now? Great!
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It's incredible to see so many people here from Austin. Of course, it's a local conference, but when I signed up to talk here, I was thinking there might be 50 or 100 people. This is truly amazing to me.
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Quickly, I'll go over what Spiceworks does: we build software for IT professionals in small and medium businesses to manage their inventory, service tickets, and more. We were founded in January 2006.
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Our mission was to simplify IT management for small to medium businesses. At the time we launched, we were the first free ad-supported IT application.
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Now, ad-supported applications are becoming more common, and today we have 450,000 IT professionals using Spiceworks in 196 countries.
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Our app isn't even internationalized, yet we manage over 20 million devices and serve 13 million users through those installations.
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Our tagline is that we’re building the app for everything IT.
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This is a quick timeline of a day in the life of an IT guy. We would love it if they used us every day because, as an ad-supported service, we don't make money unless you use the app.
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Initially, we built a product that inventories everything within your network, including computers, printers, software, hardware, etc. Additionally, we integrated a community into our application, allowing users to seek advice and expertise from other Spiceworks users.
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We also built a help desk feature into Spiceworks so users could resolve issues and interact with each other electronically. Eventually, they could share best practices and purchase products and services through Spiceworks.
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Now, let’s talk about our architecture.
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Our application runs on a cloud of Linux servers utilizing Ruby on Rails, and the Spiceworks application itself is installed on Windows computers in small and medium business environments.
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However, this was not how it was initially designed; it was intended to be a hosted solution. Once we began deploying, we learned that users wanted their private inventory data to remain within their networks.
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Consequently, we adopted a local machine installation model using Ruby on Rails. Everything is driven from a web server launched from that Windows computer on-site.
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It’s interesting because we kind of backed into this model while trying to determine how to manage over 450,000 installations. If we had to host all those servers ourselves, it would have been a nightmare.
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Instead, we found this hybrid model where users install the application locally and it works for us.
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Scaling has been huge for us. We started with just three developers, and in three months we were able to release our Alpha version.
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I want to explain why we chose Ruby on Rails. We had experience with Java, .NET, and various other frameworks, but we needed something fast; we couldn't afford to wait a year to develop our application.
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We were looking for technology that allowed quick prototyping but could also scale. Despite hearing rumors that Rails didn't scale well, in January 2006, we took the risk.
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Initially, we were concerned about documentation. Having worked with Python, I leaned towards it due to its great documentation, but one of my developers prototyped in Ruby in two days what would have taken weeks in Java, and his enthusiasm convinced me to give it a chance.
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Now, Spiceworks is adding about 1,200 businesses a day. So, regarding scalability, we’re doing quite fine.
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I want to share some lessons on handling distributed installations. When you have half a million installations of Ruby on Rails distributed across small businesses worldwide, the original idea was to update everyone whenever there was a change.
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The thought process was that perhaps when we check in a line of code everyone gets it, and everything would be fine. We thought it would be easy to support since everyone would be up-to-date.
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However, we found that sometimes the models were misaligned, or we had to migrate data. This could be confusing for users, especially those with a larger number of devices.
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Updating seamlessly via an application restart can be problematic, as many installations may not get restarted often.
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Thus, we decided that whenever a user makes a restart, we'll sneak in the update. Unfortunately, many users leave their services up for months without restarting.
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This led to confusion as users would unexpectedly find the application had changed without prior notice. Consequently, we began allowing users to choose when to update; they could follow the process to receive updates when they felt comfortable.
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The challenge was that users ended up with old versions for long periods, leading to multiple versions in support, complicating issue resolution.
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The current implementation uses a hybrid approach: major updates require user approval, while minor updates can be pushed out silently.
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Our application on the user's end makes calls to the main servers, checking for major and minor version updates.
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In production environments, managing updates has its challenges. Developers have created a custom handler to split workloads into multiple gems, and updates can switch paths and clear out templates efficiently.
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Regarding Ruby performance on Windows, we noted that stock Ruby from One-Click is significantly slower compared to Mac or Linux. After benchmarking, we realized Windows versions needed optimization.
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One developer took the initiative to enable the optimization flag for Windows Ruby, resulting in substantial performance improvements.
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Initially, we were waiting for the next Rails version, but as our application grew, speed became essential. Therefore, we started looking into optimizations.
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Some changes included optimizing function calls and refining the code to significantly increase execution speed.
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As we continued making changes, we increased the efficiency of our application. For instance, we doubled data collected while scanning devices and improved the execution from several seconds to mere milliseconds.
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And with further enhancements like custom Ruby extensions implemented in C, we ensured ongoing performance improvements.
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If you're into changing UI, be careful. A previous vote scheme was altered, leading to user backlash.
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Also, I learned my lesson on searching and performance. We used Fair for searching strings within our app; while it was working, it needed to be better tuned.
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Lastly, we must beta test major updates. An actual case where we failed to do this resulted in user dissatisfaction.
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There’s a common misconception that Rails doesn’t scale, but once we delved into our code and optimizations, we realized that it was more about our approach than the framework itself.
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Being aware of inefficient queries and programming methods was a key lesson learned for our team, and making adjustments to our data handling led to much faster load times.
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It’s essential to recognize simple practices that can greatly enhance the user experience, including insightful community feedback.
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Through our experiences, we've come to appreciate the importance of knowing our users and building features they want by actively engaging with them in discussions and reviews.
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With close to half a million users and only a few support representatives, we've leveraged our community for assistance where many users help solve issues for others.
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Developers also benefit from user feedback, allowing them to address core issues and enhance usability.
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We have developed features in our monitors and alerts page that automate background checks and allow discussions on automation with others.
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However, we've learned the necessity of enhancing usability while maintaining aesthetics and awareness.
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Ultimately, community-managed features have proven incredibly popular in fostering collaboration.
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Throughout this process, I have developed ways to optimize our scanner, allowing it to run more efficiently across the network.
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For each scanning group, we normalize the entries and ensure the devices are being probed without downtime, dramatically improving performance.
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Finally, we’ve seen that by utilizing multithreading and concurrent processing, we've managed to significantly reduce the time taken to gather and analyze device information.
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In conclusion, as a Ruby community, we all face common challenges, but through continuous learning and adaptation, we can enhance our skills and ensure our applications serve users better.
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As we work together to solve problems and face challenges head-on, the support of the community can lead to remarkable growth for those who contribute.
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Remember, being passionate about your work as a programmer allows you to innovate, improve, and ultimately enjoy the process of developing with Ruby and Rails.
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If you have any questions or would like to reach out, feel free to email me.
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Thank you for your attention!
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The video equipment rental cost is paid for by PeepCode screencasts.
