This tutorial aims to guide you through the best practices for deploying and scaling your Rails applications. By the end of this tutorial, you will know how to monitor your application's performance effectively and scale it as your user base grows.
How to effectively scale your Rails application to cater to a larger audience
Prerequisites:
One of the most effective ways to deploy Rails applications is by using Capistrano, a remote server automation and deployment tool.
Capistrano is written in Ruby and helps you deploy your application to remote servers. It creates a new directory for each new version of your application, making it easy to roll back if anything goes wrong.
Monitoring is vital for maintaining the health of your application. You can monitor your Rails app using New Relic APM or Scout APM.
New Relic APM provides you with in-depth analytics about your application's performance. It offers details about throughput, response time, and other essential metrics.
Scout APM is another excellent tool for monitoring your Rails app. It provides insights into the most expensive queries, helping you optimize your application for better performance.
To scale your Rails application, you can either scale vertically (adding more power to your existing server) or horizontally (adding more servers).
Vertical scaling involves enhancing your server's capacity. This can be done by adding more RAM, increasing CPU power, or expanding disk space.
Horizontal scaling means adding more servers to your application. This usually involves a load balancer to distribute requests across multiple servers.
# Capfile
require 'capistrano/deploy'
#...
This file tells Capistrano what tasks to load. The capistrano/deploy is a default task that comes with Capistrano.
# Gemfile
gem 'newrelic_rpm'
Add the newrelic_rpm gem to your Gemfile. Then, configure it using the instructions provided by New Relic.
Unfortunately, there's no code snippet for this. You'll need to upgrade your server through your hosting provider.
Again, there's no code snippet. You would add more servers through your hosting provider and set up a load balancer.
In this tutorial, you've learned how to deploy a Rails application using Capistrano, monitor its performance using New Relic or Scout, and scale it both vertically and horizontally.