Sorry for posting to such a wide audience, but we are really in a rush and need urgent help. We’re looking for a Rails developer with experience deploying to Engine Yard who can help with an urgent issue regarding one of our applications. Today, Amazon rebooted some of our instances during maintenance, and the servers have failed to come back up correctly.
We need someone who can dig in, quickly figure out what’s wrong, and fix it ASAP. I believe the problems may stem from one or more of the following:
A connection problem between the application and database instances
Outdated configuration files (we haven’t updated these since February, and perhaps EngineYard has changed in some way)
The Rails app using outdated gems
The Rails app using an outdated version of Ruby or Rails
At a minimum, I would like you to fix the immediate problem, whatever it may be. Subsequent to that, it would also be good for you to stay on and see if the server can be better configured to prevent such problems in the future.
Unless you hire a full-time sysadmin, I would recommend against EngineYard or any DIY-style hosting platform
“Amazon rebooted our servers and our app didn’t come back online” – you really got to take a step back and think about the implications of that statement in a broader context. (Why do you have servers that don’t come back online when rebooted, if your system is so brittle why don’t you have a dedicated resource whose job it is to keep the server running all the time.)
Not to be condescending, but this is why so many of us like Heroku as an alternative.
After having used them quite a bit last year, I would not recommend EY to an company that didn’t have a full-time sysadmin person who was available for constantly monitoring the servers.