We have released the new Cyloop music platform built using Ruby on Rails. I have had the pleasure of working with the team at Hoodiny to build and deploy this great application.
The platform has been adopted by MSN Brazil and MSN Mexico for their default music channel, soon to be the default music channel for MSN Latin America, MSN US Latin and MSN Canada.
While being featured on the home page of MSN Brazil and MSN Mexico we witnesses a tremendous amount of traffic. We knew this was going to be the case which is why we spend a considerable amount of time pre release working on caching and optimizations.
One of my favorite features of the application is the ability to follow your friends and discover music based on what they are listening to, you can also follow you favorite bands. We are using a messaging queue platform called RabbitMQ to accomplish the queuing of activity (writes/reads). Another aspect of our caching strategy is heavy usage of Memcached coupled with warm-caching of the activity feeds which are currently being stored to flat files.
During the caching and optimization phase we implemented a separate messaging queue for emailing and image uploads, lots of rails page, action and fragment caching as well as strategic usage of rails metal and cache-money to enhance performance.
Many thanks to the entire team who worked on this application. The Hoodiny dev team (Scott, David, Steven, Rick, Ana), the Hashrocket team, and Jason Seifer for bringing his rails scaling insight to the table. Also many thanks to Engine Yard and all the excellent application support technicians who helped up configure our cluster.
More to come, thank you and may we see continued success.