GridIron: The Power of Webhook-Centric Architectures

A suite of examples showcasing the power
of webhooks using Iron.io and SendGrid.

At Iron.io, we believe strongly that there is a new model of application architectures that is becoming not only viable, but the most powerful way to build your application.
We believe that more and more applications will be built not using static servers and direct integrations, but instead using workers that come into existence when you need them and shut down when they’re no longer necessary.

GoSF Meetup: Canonical + Go 1.1 + a growing Go community

Travis Reeder from Iron.io kicks off the GoSF Meetup (5/9)

Iron.io is the lead organizer of GoSF – which is a meetup specially centered around Go programming language. GoSF has been around for just over a year and it's apparent it's becoming a key group within the developer community.

We base this view not just on the growing attendance (our most recent meetup was packed) but also by the large number of well-known companies lining up to give presentations on their use of Go.

Blacksmith – an IronMQ client for .NET

Blacksmith is a .NET client for IronMQ that was created by Khalid Abuhakmeh from Aqua Bird Consulting. Khalid recently posted a great article on the reasons behind it and how to use it.

Blog Post on BlackSmith (Tech.Pro)

Iron.io @ HackTheMidwest

Iron.io will be an API sponsor at the upcoming HackTheMidwest on June 15-16th, 2013 in Kansas City. The event is put on by Kansas City IT Professionals, a grass-roots group of 10,000 strong (the heavy lifting is largely the efforts of Michael Gelphman, hackathon/tech event producer extraordinaire.)

The goal is to bring small teams of developers and designers together and give them the setting and inspiration to build something really powerful.

Iron.io @ Civic Data Challenge

Iron.io is thrilled to be a sponsor of the Civic Data Challenge. It's both a cool tech challenge – its prime goal is to turn raw data around ‘civic health’ into useful applications and visualizations AND a worthwhile cause – providing a great forum to directly impact public decision-making. It's put on by the NCoC (National Conference on Citizenship) and the Knight Foundation and has a number of noted civic data partners involved.

Laravel 4 + IronMQ Push Queues = Insane Goodness

Laravel is an increasingly popular PHP framework with a strong and growing following.

If you're a PHP developer, it's a framework to seriously explore if not dig in and put to good use. The design principles are centered around a clean framework that uses a simple, expressive syntax.

Iron.io Joins OpenStack to Drive Open Cloud Message Queues

Iron.io is now an OpenStack supporter. This may not appear all that unusual – given the top companies originally behind the initiative plus the growing numbers joining – but it is noteworthy for a cloud services company. 

With most cloud services, it shouldn’t really matter what the underlying IT stack or even what cloud you’re running on. API-driven services essentially abstract the VMs, infrastructure, and scaling away to provide elastic utility-based computing. Just plug into the APIs and eliminate the need to provision resources based on current or anticipated loads. 

IronMQ Handling 250M Requests Per Day, IronWorker Executing Over 500K Jobs

This month, Iron.io hit two major milestones in our usage numbers for two of our services.

IronMQ is now handling over 250 million requests per day (== 174K per minute == 2,900 per second). This is up from 100 million just three months ago.

Also, IronWorker is now executing over 500,000 jobs (tasks) per day. That means we are executing your code across our farm of worker servers, half a million times per day.

Relify adds IronWorker to their Stack ➞ Ridiculously Simple Worker Scalability

Relify, a Recommendations as a Service engine, is one of the really cool customers that Iron.io serves. They offer a simple API that eliminates the complexity of developing a recommendation engine –which means you can greatly increase your relevance to your users.

Terry Horner is the Co-Founder and CEO of Relify. A recent blog post of his details their use of a scale-out processing pattern that, in concert with IronWorker, allowed them to significantly scale their recommendations service. All in a short period of time without any infrastructure or much cost.

IronWorker API Outages - Post Mortem

Starting around 9:45 PT on April 6th, the IronWorker API started having issues where requests to the API would not receive a response and timeout. The issues were intermittent over the next few days with short outages followed by hours of normal operation. The cause of the issues were a couple infrequently used queries that weren’t using indexes, more information on that below. The issue was finally resolved around 2:45 PT on April 8th.

Note: this only affected the IronWorker API. IronMQ, IronCache, the IronWorker scheduler, and the IronWorker backend were not affected.