Now that Rails 4.2.0 is out and several things have aligned, we took the plunge to upgrade to Ruby 2.1.4 from 1.9.3. We had already upgraded to Rails 4.2.0. Upgrading ruby was fairly straightforward, and we improved the AWS deployment in the process: faster updates & DB no longer tied to EB. Here are the steps we took: The plan was to create a whole new AWS EB environment using the latest 2014. ... Read more

We recently upgraded to Rails 4.2.0.beta2 to take advantage of the new Active Job framework and other improvements. We chose Sucker Punch to avoid the cost of using a separate worker on Elastic Beanstalk, along with Fist Of Fury for scheduling ( which we ended up not using ). So we introduced active jobs to spawn threads for anything that takes time, like emails, external API calls, and heavy DB processing. ... Read more

Again, two months, almost to the day since we last hit problems with deployment, we are here again. Up till the day before, deployments worked fine if a little slow, but now they fail with a timeout. The site is running okay but remains at that version: The process is now faultless: “Deploying Versions with Zero Downtime”. Here is what we did: STEP 1) Take a DB snapshot. STEP 2) Duplicate the environment in AWS management console, using the DB snapshot just created. ... Read more

Two months, almost to the day since we last hit problems with deployment, it looks like we are here again. Up till the day before, deployments worked fine if a little slow, but now they fail with a timeout. The site is running okay but remains at that version: It is not possible to retrieve the logs - also due to an execution timeout. It is possible to SSH to the EC2 server but looking around the logs it appears everything is rolled back. ... Read more