Hello everyone, I’m the author of the Passenger app server. We are on a mission to make Unix server tools easier to use, more convenient, more robust and generally more awesome. So we are thinking about what we should work on next. I would like to ask you all, what kind of problems do you encounter when using Ruby/Rails, or when dealing with deployment/operations/devops in general, that need solving? Or what do you experience as cumbersome or suboptimal and think needs improvement? How important do you deem those issues to be, and how satisfied you are with existing solutions/mitigations/workarounds for them? Please let me know either by replying here, by emailing me (hongli@phusion.nl) or sending me a tweet (@honglilai).
Even if you yourself don’t have any challenges or ideas, please forward this message to your friends. I would like to hear their feedback as well!
Hey @FooBarWidget, firstly, thank you for Passenger! I use it with my Rails sites, and on this very server in fact
I can’t really think of any issues I’ve had tbh, it has been rock solid!!
With regards to devops, while I like and use Capistrano, I do think a simpler (and well maintained) deployment tool could be something worth looking at?
Perhaps you can share what’s been suggested already and we can comment on anything that stand out?
With regard to a simpler deployment tool: it is something that I have considered but I am wondering how much demand there is for that. Nowadays there is Heroku, Elastic Beanstalk, and even open source PaaSes like Flynn. It also seems everybody is raving about Docker and Kubernetes. How do you feel about all that?
If anybody else is interested in the suggestion for a better deployment tool, please leave a comment here along with an explanation of the use case.
I’ve always found it a little sad that so many in the Ruby world do not embrace dedicated servers and instead opt for hosting in the cloud - dedicated servers could save them a lot of money.
Perhaps that could be something worth looking into? A control panel for servers that is ready to host all sorts of apps? (Thinking something like Virtualmin but geared more towards hosting apps rather than more of a general server control panel…)
