Rails on AWS: Do you need nginx between Puma and ALB?

When I set up Rails on AWS, I usually use the following pattern: (CloudFront) → ALB → Puma I was wondering: Is it always necessary to put nginx between the ALB and Puma server? My theory behind not using nginx is that because it has its own queue (while the Classic Load Balancer had a very limited “surge queue”, the ALB does not have such a queue), it will help in getting responses back to the user (trading for increased latency) while hindering metrics used for autoscaling and choosing what backend to route the request to (such as Rejected Connection Count).

"Logging in" to AWS ECS Fargate

April 17, 2020

I’m a big fan of AWS ECS Fargate. I’ve written in the past about managing ECS clusters, and with Fargate – all of that work disappears and is managed by AWS instead. I like to refer to this as quasi-serverless. Sorta-serverless? Almost-serverless? I’m open to better suggestions. 😂 There are a few limitations of running in Fargate, and this blog post will focus on working around one limitation: there’s easy way to get an interactive command line shell within a running Fargate container.

Web App Development and Caching

May 23, 2014

Any web developer who works with external services or databases (that’s probably almost every web developer) has probably run into performance problems. The problem is that running code by itself is pretty fast. Databases and external services / APIs are very slow. Waiting on an external API to load is basically the computer equivalent of waiting for a brontosaurus to walk a kilometer. As web developers, we have a very powerful tool called caching.

My Experiences with Rubinius

April 22, 2013

Rubinius is an implementation of the Ruby language spec. I’ve been using it recently for a project, and I’ve been liking it so far. Here’s a few thoughts I’ve been having while using it. Philosophy The Core Rubinius, in its core, is written in C++ and uses LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine). Without getting too technical, it translates the Ruby code that you write into efficient machine code, then executes the machine code directly on the CPU.