| Admittedly I haven't written any ruby code in a very long time, but you only briefly touched on the reason we ran away from it after giving it a serious try: > rails devs pay the bills with other tech or by maintaining legacy rails apps That "maintaining legacy rails apps" job just doesn't exist with our PHP apps. Once properly tested and deployed PHP will generally work perfectly and smoothly for years with zero maintenance unless someone finds a bug that was missed in testing. You can pretty much setup a cron job to apply security patches and that's it. Maintenance done. The only downtime I can recall was when our datacenter installed buggy firmware on their storage array and brought down every virtual machine we had with them... which was a pretty rare and unusual event (by the time they fixed it, we had already moved everything to another datacenter... and it seems we weren't alone because they went bankrupt). With ruby that wasn't our experience at all. We found our production code would regularly just stop working and resources had to be pulled off other tasks with zero notice to figure out why/fix the issue. It was a productivity nightmare. Maybe that's improved now, but from reading the Shopify and GitHub blog posts they both seem to be taking on mammoth amounts of work to ensure their systems are reliable. At the companies I work for (more than one) we expect anyone qualified to do work like that to be dedicating all of their time to other things. All of the apps we built in ruby were rewritten from scratch in PHP and we haven't had any regrets. I've never really liked PHP and I actively hate JavaScript, but I've come to accept those two languages are just more practical than anything else. I'm definitely keeping an eye out for that to change though - Swift is look promising for example. |
My current app runs on AWS ECS. Upgrades are largely just updating my Dockerfile or merging a pull request from Dependabot. We have pagerduty and it only goes off when a 3rd party API is down, usually resolving itself.