Twitter, Ruby on Rails and Scalability
posted in Technology, Developers, Software |Blaine Cook, the former CTO of Twitter writes about scalability. Twitter has often been pointed to as an example of the kind of problems that a Ruby on Rails application will often encounter when trying to really scale big. He points out that languages don’t scale, architectures do.
Which is right. The problem isn’t Ruby. Its Ruby on Rails. Ruby is just a language. Ruby on Rails is an architecture that makes database interactions sometimes _too_ automatic. Unfortunately Blaine’s post seems to miss this distinction.
Its possible to build scalable applications with Ruby on Rails, but for all that Rails advocates making writing web apps the right way “on rails”, it leads you down some poor paths with respect to scalability. I know some great developers who understand enough about how the inner stuff works that I’m sure they can make scalable Rails applications, but I’ve also seen most that aren’t.