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

…with less sql queriesA Rails application will make a large number of sql queries per page unless steps are taken to mitigate this. This is bad because it degrades the performance of your app, affects your ability to scale, and will cost you money. Install the New Relic gem to see the sql queries made when loading a page in your app. Here is what we changed to reduce the number of sql queries per page: ... Read more