Our RubyConf XI talk on Rails services
Rails services in the walled garden from Sidu Ponnappa on Vimeo.
This is the recording of our talk at RubyConf 2011 at New Orleans where Niranjan and I speak about "Rails services in the walled garden."
In typical service oriented architectures, monolithic applications are sliced along domain verticals to create several independently evolving 'services' that can be used in combination to achieve various outcomes.
Rails applications lend themselves to this architecture beautifully and are slowly making inroads in big organisations for this reason.
One of the big problems with this approach is that analyzing and managing large quantities of data from multiple services to produce a result becomes very hard. What was originally a relatively simple task when all data sat in the same database as part of a monolithic application, becomes, when split into multiple services, a whole different beast. This talk will focus on our experiences building a system involving about a dozen rails based services integrated over HTTP and XML and the issues we had to deal with when working with large data sets.
