Build a Cloud in Thirteen Years

Infrastructure Control Planes in Ruby, 2011 to 2024

https://slides.com/fdrfdr

Hello

Daniel Farina, a founder of Ubicloud

A new IaaS, compare AWS, Azure, GCP
An Open Source Ruby Program
Focused on core products
A better value: a 10-30% the price

What is it?

Practice Makes Perfect...ish

Ubicloud's code is the latest in a progression:

Crunchy Data

Citus Data

Heroku Department of Data

Acknowledgements Will Leinweber and Craig Kerstiens of {Heroku,Citus,Crunchy} without whom this would have been impossible.

...and to Peter van Hardenberg, who stands at the beginning.

The Talk

Roda HTTP Routing
Why Ruby?

Roda

"Routing Tree" Framework

The "tree" takes the form of nested blocks.

Elegant "before" filters

Matchers accept literal values and simple data types.

class App < Roda
  route do |r|
    # Matches "/items/<whatever>"
    r.on "items" do
      # Matches /items/[0-9]+$
      r.is Integer do |item_id|
        @item = Item[item_id]

        # e.g. GET /items/123
        r.get { "Rendering item: #{@item}" }
        
        # e.g. DELETE /items/123
        r.delete { @item.destroy }
      end
    end

    # Matches /foo, /foo/bar, /pear/apple/peach
    r.on String do |a_prefix|
      r.get { "You asked for #{a_prefix}" }
    end
  end
end

class CloverWeb < Roda
  # [...Lots of plugin setup...]

  route do |r|
    r.public
    r.assets

    r.on "webhook" do
      r.hash_branches(:webhook_prefix)
    end
    check_csrf!

    @current_user = Account[rodauth.session_value]
    r.rodauth
    rodauth.load_memory
    rodauth.check_active_session
 
    r.root do
      r.redirect rodauth.login_route
    end
    rodauth.require_authentication

    r.hash_branches("")
  end
end

Ubicloud "Web" Top Level

class CloverWeb
  hash_branch("project") do |r|
    @serializer = Serializers::Web::Project

    r.get true do
      @projects = serialize(@current_user.projects.filter(&:visible))

      view "project/index"
    end

    r.post true do
      project = @current_user.create_project_with_default_policy(r.params["name"], provider: r.params["provider"])

      r.redirect project.path
    end

"Leaf" Level

still "CloverWeb" (one class, many files)
hash_branch jumps to the matching block
runs more familiar Roda code

./clover_web.rb:class CloverWeb < Roda
./routes/web/project.rb:class CloverWeb
./routes/web/github.rb:class CloverWeb
./routes/web/project/github.rb:class CloverWeb
./routes/web/project/user.rb:class CloverWeb
./routes/web/project/vm.rb:class CloverWeb
./routes/web/project/billing.rb:class CloverWeb
./routes/web/project/policy.rb:class CloverWeb
./routes/web/project/private_subnet.rb:class CloverWeb
./routes/web/project/location/vm.rb:class CloverWeb
./routes/web/project/location/private_subnet.rb:class CloverWeb
./routes/web/project/location/postgres.rb:class CloverWeb
./routes/web/project/postgres.rb:class CloverWeb
./routes/web/project/location.rb:class CloverWeb
./routes/web/account.rb:class CloverWeb
./routes/web/webhook/github.rb:class CloverWeb

How many reopenings?

Lots is okay

Why do things that way?

Performance
Reload/Development Performance
It's actually totally fine?

Why Ruby?

2011

Ruby 🔥
Sequel 💧

Sinatra 💧

Postgres 💧

2024

Ruby 💧

Sequel 💧

Postgres 🔥

Roda ❄️

Rodauth ❄️

Perspective outside Rails

Legend: "normalness" in descending order 🔥💧❄️

Reinterpreting Ruby

Common Interpretations

inspired, artistic, beautiful
"productive"

"developer happiness"
slow

wild or unprincipled

hard to maintain
good for prototyping, but

Reinterpretation

Stable

Rigorous

Prudent

Restrained

Economical
...slowish

Language Stability and Restraint

2011: Start writing Ruby: Sequel, Sinatra
2013: Ruby 2.0 adds keyword arguments
2016: Ruby 3x3 initiative begins
2021: YJIT in Ruby

Stability in Key Libraries

2007: Sequel

2014: Roda

2015: Rodauth

Jeremy Evans

Maintains all of:

Not only an acknowledgement.

The three programs are cohesive.

Roda: request routing

Rodauth: authentication

Sequel: database access

He has presentations on all three

Jeremy's Humility

Blink and you'll miss something important in his talks.

...it gives me a sense of accomplishment to be able to fix bugs in Ruby that have been known but unfixed for many years. That's a situation that doesn't happen in my other open source projects.

—From one tiny corner of an interview

Fact Check: TRUE

Monthly(?!) Releases

Plugins

Check out

roda-sequel-stack

Rigorous Testing

100% branch coverage: totally reasonable

can be done with rspec or minitest.

Are tests a crutch for lack of

static typing?

no...

if you seek the highest standards of a rigorous program

Is static typing interesting?

Probably, for cross referencing

VSCode & LSP are prime movers here

Improve economy of elimination of simple defects