Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdoms | Hacker News Reader

> It's definitely noticeable when you try to learn a newer framework with a much smaller community and less opinions. You could end up Googling for what you might think is a common thing to solve only to find zero answers in sight

I have felt this exact way when I'm Googling for problems running Rails in modern cloud environments. It seems like there are loads of problems that are largely unsolved in the community at large when you want to go beyond Heroku and stand your app up in containers against cloud components using best practices. As a Rails newbie it has been downright painful and there have been many cases where I wish I was still writing a language like C# or Java where containers and modern cloud architectures have been embraced instead of shunned.

View on HN

For a sample of one, I've run rails in containers for years without problems. Is your problem the containerization, or trying to split a rails app into microservices?

I've also split a rails application into separate services, but if you really want the MICROservices approach, then you're going to lose most of the advantages of rails.

As someone who learned Rails for the first time last year (previously worked on C++, C#, and Python projects), I concur. I find that most of the SO posts/other discussion of Rails stuff tends to be older, usually pre-2015, and that can be painful when dealing with any technologies that have substantially changed in the past 5+ years.

Almost every modern Rails app runs containerized. Heroku is containerized! What are you having trouble with?

that seems beyond the scope of rails itself. why would you want to complicate deployment as a newbie? what problems are you facing that containerization specifically solves for you, rather than deploying to a (virtual) server directly? and why not heroku to start?

Can't speak for GP, but in my case I had to learn Rails in an environment where the previous devs were no longer available and the whole app was developed on EC2 instances by a different team. Later, the company decided that containerization was the Next Big Thing and we needed to port the app or else we'd have either no platform to run on or no job. I would have loved to do the simple "just run it on Heroku" thing but sometimes that is just not possible due to external pressures. A lot of the success of Rails is due to its "my way or the highway" methodology where you either conform to the vision of DHH or you can get lost, but the downsides of this priciple are obvious when real life won't conform to his vision.

What about rails doesn’t “just work” in a containerized platform?

I'm a Rails newbie, not a software newbie. I was brought in as an engineer with no Rails experience but deep Cloud experience to help break a large complex monolith and yes, we're running into the same "DHH's way or the highway" quagmire that infests the Rails world, as mentioned in a sister comment.

When learning something new, it's usually best not to fight against the stream. After you understand it well, then your efforts to bring it into your old way of doing things will be more fruitful.

Large complex is usually just a bad architectural choice or misunderstanding your business requirements

If anyone has any tips or documentation that might help with regards to Rails containerization, I'm interested in knowing as well.

What specifically are you running into? I may have trouble seeing any gaps in documentation because I’ve been running rails in a containzerized environment for years and it seems to just work

I'm still in the planning stages of migrating rails from ec2 to ecs.

I asked because parent comment said he/she was running into problems. But if your experience is smooth sailing so far then that's great.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com