Lately, we have been involved in a project where our clients needed a site capable of serving a large number of anonymous users and a reasonable number of concurrently logged in users. In order to reach these goals, we looked to cloud computing. We first got as much caching as possible, since this is relatively simple and goes a long way. We next created a distributed system. This posting describes how we got it to work. A diagram of our architecture is below and the various configurations are summarized at the bottom.

Rails developers who want to leverage the speed and power of Rackspace Cloud Files are in luck – there are several different options to choose from. In this blog post, I will take a quick tour through three of the most popular Rails gems/plugins for cloud asset storage: attachment_fu, paperclip, and carrierwave.

This plugin for Merb and Rails provides a simple and extremely flexible way to upload files.

helpful configuration instructions

Full programmmatic access to Rackspace.

This is a Ruby interface into the Rackspace Mosso Cloud Files service. Cloud Files is reliable, scalable and affordable web-based storage hosting for backing up and archiving all your static content. Cloud Files is the first and only cloud service that leverages a tier one CDN provider to create such an easy and complete storage-to-delivery solution for media content.