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Let’s get online and start a business!
Last week we discussed the possibility of starting one’s own web business using the inexpensive and scalable Amazon Web Services as a backend. This type of distributed computing is beyond the scope of work I’ve done in the past so this should be interesting and it will probably take a while. With that in mind, here are the resources I’m using to get my feet wet.
RadRails: This is a Windows-compatible Rails development environment that plugs into Eclipse or Aptana.
Rails on AWS: This is a 44 page presentation on Scribd that outlines the pricing and architecture behind the AWS cloud. There are some slides explaining the basics of running a Ruby on Rails application using AWS. This should be my first major resource for this project.
Introduction to AWS for Ruby Developers: This one looks like more of a white paper. It’s hosted on the Amazon site and written by a developer of custom Rails applications.
Using Ruby on Rails with Facebook Platform: Facebook seems like a good testbed for a web application once I can put together something that works. It should be comparatively easy to solicit test users, and I won’t need to start out worrying about something that’s profitable. I may just want to build a simple game as a test run.
Scaling Bumper Sticker: A 1 Billion Page Per Month Facebook RoR App: This article on the High Scalability blog explains how the LinkedIn team built a Rails app for Facebook just to see if they could. I won’t worry about high-end scalability concerns too much at first but I’ll definitely need to read over this before trying to commercialize anything.
image credit: JulianBleecker
