Feature flags are a way to affect how your application behaves at runtime, without having to deploy new code. As the name suggests, they can be used to switch certain features on or off depending on a specified rule. A type of feature flag you have probably already encountered can be implemented as simple environment variables. Consider the following code you typically find in every Rails app’s production.rb.

Imagine this: you’ve just finished working on your brand new Rails app and have deployed it to a cloud provider like DigitalOcean. Like any developer, you’re very proud of your work but you still have lots of questions, like: Your goal is to provide the best user experience. You want to be notified whenever errors or other important events occur so you can take care of them fast. It would be great to have a setup that automatically monitors your application. Enter AppSignal!

Cron jobs are an essential tool for automating tasks in Ruby on Rails applications. In this article, we'll explore the basics of cron jobs, how to set them up using the Whenever gem, and some advanced features and best practices to keep in mind.

This blog post aims to dissect the various deployment options available for Rails applications in 2024, emphasizing the choice between native and containerized approaches. It dives into the advantages and drawbacks of each method and explores the hosting options available for each. Let’s dive right in!

AppSignal now supports Solid Cache, giving you the same deep cache performance insights you'd get from other Rails cache stores. In this blog post, we'll give you a quick tour of Solid Cache, and how you can benefit from monitoring your app's cache with AppSignal.

A Rails profiler is a tool used to analyze the performance of your Ruby on Rails application. It helps identify bottlenecks, memory leaks, and other performance issues, allowing you to optimize your code and improve overall web application speed. Profilers are essential in ensuring your web application runs smoothly and delivers a better user experience.

Rails is a Ruby framework for developing web applications. It favors the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture and includes generators that create the files needed for each MVC component. Rails applications consist of a database, an application server for running application code, and a web server for processing requests. Rails provides multiple integrations for its supporting database (e.g., MySQL and PostgreSQL) and web server (e.g., Apache and NGINX).

Time series databases like InfluxDB are databases that specialize in handling time series data, which is data that is indexed by time. Unlike traditional databases, time series databases are optimized for reading and writing data with less performance consideration for updating or deleting data. Due to the time-dependent nature of time series data, time series databases are handy for application monitoring.

Cloud 66 offers a range of deployment options for Rails applications, each offering different benefits and trade-offs.