Mac OS X Server tantrums

“At VitalSource”:www.vitalsource.com we now have a dozen Xserves running Ruby on Rails and a couple others running MySQL. While it’s mostly stable now, over the years there have been several mystery show-stopper problems that no one seems to have on other platforms.

Which is why I found this “quote from Rentzsch”:rentzsch.tumblr.com/post/3168… so interesting:

"The trick is to radically minimize all services performed by Mac OS X Server itself, and instead run services in VMware-hosted Debian images. At that point, Mac OS X Server becomes little more than a simple container for VMware, something it seems able to handle with a minimum of tantrums."

It seems kind of wasteful, but Mac OS X Server really is overkill most of the time.

Related: over the weekend I checked into “Heroku”:www.heroku.com/. I’m impressed with what they have built. If it works as advertised, I think I’ll supplement my Dreamhost stuff with Heroku any time I need a Ruby backend.

Manton Reece @manton