IronMQ on Heroku Now Open to the Public

IronMQ is now in General Availability on Heroku so everyone can add it to their Heroku apps. It's really easy to get started, here's how:

    heroku addons:add iron_mq

Then in your app configuration:


    @iron_mq = IronMQ::Client.new(:token => ENV['IRON_MQ_TOKEN'],        'project_id' => ENV['IRON_MQ_PROJECT_ID'])

Then we can use it:

    @iron_mq.messages.post("Hello World!")

And somewhere else:

    @iron_mq.messages.get()
    # do something with it. When you're done, be sure to delete the message
    @iron_mq.messages.delete()

That should get you started.  A fast, reliable and scalable queue, ready to for you to use in under five minutes!

You can find an example of a Sinatra app that you can clone and push to Heroku here: https://github.com/iron-io/heroku_sinatra_example

Read more about the Add on here: http://addons.heroku.com/iron_mq

Iron.io at Heroku Waza

Hey All,

Both Travis and I (co-founders) will be at Heroku Waza tomorrow in San Francisco. It's Heroku's first developer event and it's taking place at Yoshi's SF, a Japanese Restaurant and Jazz Club. Knowing Heroku, it'll be a great event.

Our partnership with them is growing increasingly strong as we launch IronMQ into general availability and continue to improve the integration experience for our shared users.

With that said, please stop and say hello to either of us, we'd love to chat with our customers and supporters. We will both be wearing black Iron.io t-shirts like the one pictured to the right.

See our actual pictures here so you can recognize us and/or email me: chad [at] iron.io.

Looking forward to meeting you!

Chad

Iron.io: Ironclad Cloud Application Services

It's with great pleasure that we present to you our new brand and website, Iron.io. As a cloud application services provider, our goal is to eliminate having to worry about managing and scaling complex infrastructure.  Instead we want developers to focus on building great applications.

What about SimpleWorker?

Our first service SimpleWorker, which over the last year has become the trusted leader in background processing in the cloud, will become IronWorker. The name is in keeping with the Iron.io brand which was chosen to stand for our continued dedication to providing ironclad, durable cloud services. IronWorker is the same great service and will continue to improve as we introduce more power, more clouds, and more great features that developers love.

Our Newest Service

We are also announcing our newest service IronMQ, an elastic cloud message queue for the orchestration of messages and event flow within and between cloud apps and systems. Messaging is a critical component to any app stack, and implementing, scaling, and monitoring critical message queues just got easier with IronMQ.

Why IronMQ? 

For starters, we eliminate the need for infrastructure, so it only takes a few minutes to get a scalable, elastic, and persistent message queue. We also provide monitoring, a UI, and portability through a standards-based no-lockin approach. For example, you can use the Beanstalkd client libraries and be up and running with IronMQ within minutes and even switch out to another MQ if you'd like.

Our Pledge

Finally, on top of two great services, our new Iron.io brand is a pledge to providing outstanding customer care. Without a growing list of passionate users, we'd just be "cool" technologies rather than game-changing elastic services, and truth be told, we're here to change the game.

Our doors are always open. Join us in our public chat room or email me directly at chad [at] iron.io. You can Sign up here for a free account at Iron.io and within minutes seeing the power of background processing and message queues as a service!

Say NO to infrastructure.

Chad Arimura,
Co-Founder & CEO
Iron.io

IronWorker has a Shiny New Gem and a Shiny New API

Version 2 of the SimpleWorker API is now available featuring many new functions, a bunch of new documentation, and not to mention it is a LOT faster and more robust as it is has been rewritten from the ground up. And all this comes along with a shiny new Ruby gem.

The new gem uses the new API and here's the benefits to you:

• Better performance: we changed the underlying HTTP library that uses native curl meaning you can queue up jobs a lot faster than before
• Better performance: the new API is a lot faster and has much better response response times so the gem benefits by default
• Better security: SSL and it's enabled by default
• Better authentication: The new API uses Oauth2 authentication making it much simpler to work with

NOTE: You will need to update the authentication parameters in your configuration block to use the new gem. Please check this upgrade guide to see how to do this.

SimpleWorker gem on Rubygems: http://rubygems.org/gems/iron_worker

SimpleWorker gem on github: https://github.com/iron-io/iron_worker_ruby

Start Your Engines! SimpleWorker is now an Engine Yard Partner

Engine Yard has been hosting, deploying, managing and scaling Rails applications since before the "cloud" was cool and they're still doing it, better than ever and with more "cloud" than ever. And as of this week, we're happy and proud to be one of their Platform Services partners.

http://www.engineyard.com/partner/simpleworker

If you're using Engine Yard and need scalable, elastic background processing and scheduling services for your application, be sure to give us a try!

Video Series - Episode 2: Scheduling

Hey All,

Here's the second video in my tutorial series. In under 3 minutes I demonstrate how to schedule a worker that posts to Twitter, and even show the code involved, which is a grand total of about 50 lines.

Posting a few tweets may not seem that impressive, but imagine if your scheduling needs scaled linearly with the number of users that sign up for your service. That's what SimpleWorker is best at - scaling your scheduling and background needs so that you don't have to.

I encourage you to subscribe to this blog and our Twitter account for a continuous feed of popular ways to utilize SimpleWorker in your business.  Once you start, it's addicting and you'll never build another background system again!

Thanks and stay tuned for the next edition of the tutorial series next week!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=audA_4dpIsI&hd=1

Chad

Video Series - Episode 1: Getting Started

Hey All,

I'm starting a video series to help new and current customers get the most out of the SimpleWorker service. Here's the first edition, creatively titled "Getting Started".  It is a 2 minute walkthrough from signup to running workers that you can emulate exactly to help get you started using background processing as a service.

The next video, which I'll finish this week, will dive deeper into the jobs and scheduled jobs pages.

Look for these to be posted on our homepage at SimpleWorker.com soon, but for now, here's a direct link:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeEou0wpafI

Enjoy!

Chad