TL;DR: Monolithic applications (in any technical stack, not just Rails) are bad. See also: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud</a><p>Extricate focused concerns (like authentication or service discovery) so they can be well-tested, well-designed, and reused in new services.
Initial discoverability is the one thing that most SOA articles I read tend to skip over or hand-wave away which really drives me nuts.<p>What else is there out there apart from ZooKeeper?
Really interesting read. I've only ever built one feature websites so I never came across this problem, but it indeed is an awesome problem to have. "Lots of users, lots of features, what do we do?" must be such a fun problem to solve, especially when everyone is getting paid. I need a job :(.
Have you tried using Rails engine for this or different components of your app?<p>It is actually pretty neat because the same login session can still be used within multiple engines. You can also release them as gems too.<p>I used to work on an enterprise app which we created the whole chat system with Rails engine. Then, we release the engine as a gem so that it can be used on the main app. I think it works quite well for us so far.<p>more info: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6118905/rails-3-1-engine-vs-mountable-app" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6118905/rails-3-1-engine-...</a>
I'd love to know more about the service discovery system and whether it's going to be open-sourced.<p>Was the implication that it's a layer on top of ZooKeeper or something completely different?