Running Ruby on Rails on Windows Azure
Last week we announced the availability of some great new Windows Azure features in the November Windows Azure SDK. One of these features enables Worker Roles to receive network traffic from both external and internal endpoints using HTTP, HTTPS and TCP. This new feature enables many new scenarios, one of then is the ability to run existing applications that receive traffic over sockets in Windows Azure.
Using these capabilities as a foundation we have shown the ability to run various applications and technologies such as MySQL, Mediawiki, Memcached and Tomcat. We have also provided a number of solution accelerators – which you can find links to here – in order to make it more more straightforward to get up and running. There are a couple of great PDC sessions here and here that demonstrate and explain how to get going with these technologies.
One of the questions I’ve heard from a number of customers and partners over the last few months has been “Is it possible to run Ruby on Rails on Windows Azure”. Well the answer is now yes. Using these new features and the approach used in the solution accelerators I have Ruby on Rails running at http://rubyonrails.cloudapp.net. There is also an incredibly simple test application running with a SQLite database at http://rubyonrails.cloudapp.net/posts
in my next post I will walk through the steps I took to get this working.
