DynamoDB Session Store for Rack Applications

Today we are announcing a new RubyGem that enables your Ruby on Rails or Rack-based applications to store session data inside of Amazon DynamoDB. The gem acts as a drop-in replacement for session stores inside of Rails and can also run as a Rack middleware for non-Rails apps. You can read more about how to install and configure the gem on the GitHub repository: aws/aws-sessionstore-dynamodb-ruby. If you want to get started right away, just add the gem to your Gemfile via:

gem 'aws-sessionstore-dynamodb', '~> 1.0'

For me, the best part of this gem is that it was the product of a summer internship project by one of our interns, Ruby Robinson. She did a great job ramping up on new skills and technologies, and ultimately managed to produce some super well-tested and idiomatic code in a very short period of time. Here’s Ruby in her own words:

Hello, my name is Ruby Robinson, and I was a summer intern with the AWS Ruby SDK team. My project was to create a RubyGem (aws-sessionstore-dynamodb) that allowed Rack applications to store sessions in Amazon DynamoDB.

I came into the internship knowing Java and, ironically, not knowing Ruby. It was an opportunity to learn something new and contribute to the community. After pouring myself through a series of books, tutorials, and blogs on Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and Rack, the gem emerged; with help from Loren and Trevor.

Along with creating the gem, I got to experience the Amazon engineering culture. It largely involves taking ownership of projects, innovation, and scalability. I got to meet with engineers who were solving problems at scales I had only heard of. With an Amazon internship, you are not told what to do; you are asked what you are going to do. As my technical knowledge grew, I was able to take ownership of my project and drive it to completion.

In the end I produced a gem with some cool features! The gem is a drop-in replacement for the default session store that gives you the persistence and scale of Amazon DynamoDB. So, what are you waiting for? Check out the gem today!

The experience of bringing a developer from another language into Ruby taught me quite a bit about all of the great things that our ecosystem provides us, and also shined a light on some of the things that are more confusing to newbies. In the end, it was extremely rewarding to watch someone become productive in the language in such a short period of time. I would recommend that everyone take the opportunity to teach new Rubyists the language, if that opportunity ever arises. I think it’s also important that we encourage new developers to become active in the community and write more open source code, since that’s what makes our ecosystem so strong. So, if you know of a new Rubyist in your area, invite them out to your local Ruby meetup or hackfest and encourage them to contribute to some of the projects. You never know, in a few years these might be the people writing and maintaining the library code you depend on every day.

And with that said, please check out our new Amazon DynamoDB Session Store for Rack applications and let us know what you think, either here, or on GitHub!