Well, it's almost over for me, but here are my thoughts about Railsconf 2009...

I think that this picture (possible NSFW?) sums it up. We are grownups. the kerfluffle is over from when Ubuntu "crossed the line" and it will pass for Rails/Ruby as well.

Flex is awesome. The coolest feature - to upgrade an instance to the newest stack, destroy it and recreate it. Heck, create a new one, spin it up, and then destroy the old instance.

Scaling is pretty simple. Start with solo, grow the instance as large as you need to, and then after you out grown a single instance environment, simply drop and re-add a flex instance. Database gets moved to it's own instance, and presto - you have a horizontally scaleable cluster in the cloud. Pretty powerful.

Met some neat people, and I am going to dig into a few new products and see if I need to add them to my tool belt. More on that later.

I get the feeling that Rails (and ruby) is starting to penetrate the enterprise market space more and more, and I think that's a good thing. It's a powerful tool, and with nginx/passenger or apache/passenger it's pretty easy to run internally if you need to. If you can run it outside, Solo for low to medium traffic applications is dead simple.

And, no this is not an advertisement for my employer. I honestly think that Solo/Flex is the easiest deployment option out there. I deployed Rubyflow about 4 or 5 times in 2 hours. I snagged a $30 coupon for Heroku so I will be giving them a shot in the next week or so, so expect a side by side shootout.