Enterprise Rails

Chapter 1. The Big Picture

What Is Enterprise?

You may have heard that big Internet sites like Amazon, eBay, or Google have thousands—sometimes tens of thousands, or more—of servers powering their websites. If you’re reading this book, you’ve probably already built at least one web application of your own, and it probably had only a handful of machines behind it, perhaps even just one application server and one database. In fact, maybe you had shared hosting and only had a fraction of a full server at your disposal.

If you had a great idea for an online business and were given 1,000 servers, what would you do with them? How would you make the most of them? What operational goals would you define for reliability and speed, and how would you leverage all of that hardware to achieve those goals?

Before diving into the pieces of an enterprise system, or discussing how to build one, a good starting point is to simply define enterprise.

Unfortunately, that is not an easy task. There is no particular set of tools that, if used, will make your architecture qualify as enterprise, even if the word “enterprise” is in the product names of the tools you use. The big companies mentioned earlier have built many of their own tools to support their software stack, but they are definitely still “enterprise.” Similarly, there is no single configuration of pieces that together spell enterprise. If you looked at the configuration of Google’s servers and compared their it to Amazon’s, the two would look ...