How Shopify scales Rails was one of my favorite talks at Big Ruby. Therein, John Duff talks through what Shopify’s Rails stack looks like and why it works for them. What impressed me most was that Shopify has been running basically the same stack since they started. Ruby, Rails, MySQL, Memcached. They added Redis in for queuing at one point.
I’m so easily tempted and fascinated by The New Shiny, it’s refreshing to read about a shop getting by with The Old Trusted instead. There’s a lot to be said for using solid, well-known tools for as much as you can and working with the strengths and weaknesses those tools afford you. It’s a lot closer to craftsmanship than the temptation of science fiction New Shiny tools, and less likely to turn your guts inside out when something goes sideways.
