Memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system used by many sites around. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an external data source (such as a database or API) must be read. Memcached runs on Unix, Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The memcached gem requires the following development libraries to be installed

Heroku is quite popular for lightweight webservice and like projects. Until recently Heroku only offered PostgreSQL-based database backend providers, but now Heroku offers a quite large range of database backend providers; among them Amazon RDS. This is a short run-down on how I managed to get a Heroku-based application to connect to a Amazon RDS-based database. Install the Amazon RDS command line tools $ sudo apt-get install rdscli Create a AWS Credential File (~/.

Recently I needed a simple and fast way for serving a basic static website. I ended up with a simple Ruby and Rack/Thin-based application, suitable for deploying to Heroku. Which means more or less no maintenance and it supports SSL - which is good in this case. For even simpler free HTML cloud hosting check out GitHub Pages. For SSL support Rack::SslEnforcer is used. {% gist 4181366 %} Run it locally $ rackup