What nginx + passenger means to the rails framework
Written on April 29, 2009 – 6:50 pm | by admin
I work for <insert large managed hosting provider specializing in rails deployment here> and I had the good fortune of getting to play with nginx + passenger before its recent release. This gave me some time to think about how completely it integrates into my deployment stack many weeks before it was publicly released. I've also been doing a lot of theorizing about what it means for the ruby development frameworks.
The release of Apache Passenger was met with tepid response amongst colleagues at my aforementioned employer. This was because of the dependence on Apache which we do not support nor care to include in our stack. What this meant is that hosting companies, many of whom are dropping the ball and being slow to respond to this technology are now able to provide easy to maintain rails/rack/merb (I know, all really the same thing now) solutions for shared hosting platforms. The fact that many of them are not yet using passenger is mind boggling to me but that is a rant for another post.
So for almost a year, large hosting companies with entrenched Apache solutions had the opportunity to take over a good portion of the rails hosting revenues currently being paid to managed or self managed rails friendly hosts with solid rails stacks built on nginx. With how many calls and emails I get every week from people looking for solid Rails devs I feel that this has to be a significant figure. The good news for companies like my employer is that most hosts seemed to have missed out on this opportunity. Nginx + Passenger has arrived and I think that this is big news.
What this means for the future of rails is that as other hosts come around and start providing passenger as part of their Apache install we will see more LAMP, Java and other platform developers willing to give rails a test spin. This means that the ruby community is going to grow via the rails community, the talented codemonkeys on the other side of the fence are going to start moving over some of the ideas that have grown out of their pain and we should see a continued and steady growth and innovation in our corner of the industry. It also means that the current rails expert companies have time to maintain their status as premium rails hosts by adapting to passenger and properly integrating it in to their stack before there is major competition from other hosts. So the companies that drive ruby development are going to continue to do so. The companies that don't have rails experience have no excuse to not get in to the game now. Your major rails clients will eventually outgrow you and come to us but you have no reason not to give them an inexpensive platform to start on.
This future works in favor of all involved. It allows startups to leverage ruby for their needs and find inexpensive "point and click" hosting providers for their incubation periods. It allows major Apache based hosts to get into the ruby game without much effort on their part and it allows the "expert" rails companies embracing nginx to start talking about further innovation and stop talking about the pain of managing deployments.
