Build a Cloud in Thirteen Years

In 2011, I joined a tiny team at Heroku, managing servers with a custom Ruby program. By 2023, I co-founded Ubicloud, developing the fourth generation of such a program...again, in Ruby. Unlike 2011, the choice of Ruby in 2024 raises questions, even from Ruby programmers.

The Ubicloud team's engineering approach is unusual: most of the team has used Ruby for infrastructure cloud programs, none of them depending upon Rails. I'll share our unconventional practices and assessment of Ruby's strengths, aiming to broaden perspectives on Ruby's capabilities and applications.