No worries and I am good friends with the Heroku guys and I fully give them props for lots of the pioneering ideas in this space.
This project means to take it further though and be one everyone's cloud operating system, the Linux of cloud OS's if you will. It will live or die based on the open source can build around it. I fully intend to try to build this community and nurture it so this project flourishes. The personal PaaS angle is what I'm most excited about. Whatch for my technical blog posts tomorrow after I get some rest for more info...
I agree and I'm working with marketing folks to make this stuff more clear. There are just so many details to get a release like this out the door that some things didn't get as much attention as they deserved. But your point is well taken and I'll try to get the message cleared up as it is pretty cool IMHO.
Also look for some more technical deep dive blog posts on my blog by tomorrow at http://brainspl.at where I will clarify a bunch of this stuff.(right after I get some sleep;)
It currently supports multi-tenant and single tenant, you choose when you set it up.
Currently the multi-tenancy is based on locked down unix users and permissions and other system hardening, pretty much same approach Heroku uses so you judge whether that's multi-tenant or not. We are looking into lightweight containers like lxc and friends for another implementation of the multi-tenancy.
I call BS on rabbit pushing 100K messages per core and I really like rabbit. But it is no where near 100k messages/sec per core.
AMQP does have extra capabilities and is a good messaging system and has advanced routing features, but you need to learn what exchanges, queues and bindings are and how they relate before it is useful.
I've used rabbit in production on multiple systems and it is still running on some of those. But I have switched to redis for most of my messaging needs because of the built in data structures and persistence. It makes it a much more versatile server and it is much easier to admin and much more stable. Rabbit is too easy to push over when you run it out of memory.
But I had to chime in and refute your 100k messages per core on rabbit. 20k maybe with the java client, more like 5-7k with a ruby or python client.
I can still get 80k/sec with a ruby client on redis.
The two servers are very different, redis is a swiss army knife of data structures over the network, that is why it is so useful. AMQP and rabbit are targeted more at enterprise messaging and integration where raw speed doesn't matter as much as complex hierarchies of brokers and middleware.
I'm working at Vmware now on a cloud operating system. That's about all I can say right now but it is what runs vmforce and vmware's partnership with google app engine to get spring running there very well. Multiple cloud multiple language paas.
Not to cry sour grapes here but there is not one mention of Merb in that entire blog post. I personally wrote merb in order to show that rails internals could be much better, modular and faster. I did heavy duty politicking to get the two teams to come together and I think the rails merb merger is one of the coolest open source success stories vie heard of.
But not a single mention of merb in this entire post. I'm not complaining but it seems disingenuous not to mention it as the sole reason I wrote merb was to push rails forward. And when it looked like merb might possibly overtake rails I went ahead and gave merb to the rails project and got the two teams together so there wasn't wasted effort. After all to have ruby and rails itself win we needed to compete with java and python and php. Merb was starting to fragment the ruby community as it became a more and more viable option and I did some personal heavy politicking to get it merged back into rails so we could take on the world instead of infighting within the ruby community.
I think it's been a great success story and most of the ideas of merb's architecture have made it into rails.
So I'm incredibly happy to see rails 3 finally come out. And I'm incredibly happy that my little experiment in making rails architecture better has paid off and the two projects merged. But I do think it's a bit weak that merb was not mentioned once in the article.
(Edit) all this being said I don't want to come across as co plaining. My work on merb ended up exactly as I wanted it to, it made rails better.
So huge congratulations to the rails team for making this happen!
try being a founder of a ~100 person startup and you will see how weeks quickly become 100 hours. I never meant to say that I did 100 hour weeks every week but I did a lot of 100 hour weeks and definitely not very many 40 hours weeks.
I'm not saying not to get a degree and I do sometimes wish that I had gone for a CS degree. But that being said I have learned all I needed to know in order to grow a 100 people strong cutting edge company and all I have is my GED.
And even though I only have my GED I am still very familiar with how computers work, memory management, building virtual machines, etc. I have a small scheme here that compiles to rubinius bytecode and then gets JIT'd by LLVM into machine code that I will release one of these days and I have read tons of papers and feel like I know as much or more then your average CS degree grad.
Everything you need to know is on the internet nowadays. All you have to do is spend the time to reach out and grab it and you can learn anything you want to learn and eventually get any job you want to get if you only apply yourself hard enough.
I did not mean to disparage college degrees, merely to make a comment that you can learn as much or more then you would learn at your average CS degree school by just applying yourself and reading online, then practice, practice, practice.
I have a 5 1/2 month old boy named Ryland and he is just now finally sleeping all night long(9pm to 7:30am) The first 2-3 months were zombie time. I couldn't get any work done because of the sleep dep.
My one biggest piece of advice. SLEEP WHEN THE BABY SLEEPS. or you will get NO sleep ever.
It will be the roughest thing you have ever gone through but one smile from your childs face up at yours makes it all better and reinvigorates you for another shot of energy for whatever you need to do.
Trust me though you will need to take at least 4 weeks off work for paternity leave assuming you are the father. Then once you go back to work expect to only work on the computer when you are at work. When you get home expect your wife to want some help with the kid and dinner etc. and don't expect to get any computer time at night for the first 3-4 months.
You will only get computer work done at work when you are away from the house and at the office. When you are at home your wife will have a constant stream of little things she will want you to do and you will feel like a slave, but then you will imagine what she goes through being alone with the baby all the time. and you will have mad respect for her.
Mostly try to be supportive and learn to not mumble under your breath when she asks you to do a million little things, Just do them and move along. It will pass soon once the baby hits 6 months or so and starts to have a real personality that you can interact with.
The first 4 months out of the womb is considered the 4th trimester and the kid is really still a foetus. Literally they cannot do anything for themselves until about 4 months. So its all up to you ad your spouse to do everything for them. They will be all floppy for a while not even able to hold their head up without support.
Trust me though it will all be worth it every time your little one smiles in your face and you will be re-invigorated.
Its the most incredible thing that has every happened to me and it made me re-evaluate my life and make major changes(like major changes). I resigned from my startup that I founded after 4 years(engine yard: really long story i'll write a book about someday ;)) to make sure i could spend this time with my son as much as possible. I cannot say what I am doing next but I am moving to Portland where my folks live in order for my son Ryland to be closer to his grandparents. And got a job that was understanding about working remote and weird hours. My new boss is the coolest ever he literally said "As long as you shit good code I don't care where your toilet is" :P
Don't worry, it will come naturally to you like it has to all humans thhroughout time. But remember this
SLEEP WHEN THE BABY SLEEPS DURING THE FIRST 4 MONTHS