Continuing from my Web 2.0 rave on OpenSocial, I'd like to introduce Sun partner Joyent, which provides a host of on-demand computing and storage services to small businesses and startups. They have put together a highly-optimized and scalable cloud, built on OpenSolaris and the Rails framework. Space on the cluster is sold to web developers via Joyent Accelerators:
"Accelerators are built on OpenSolaris, multi-core (8+), RAM-rich servers (32GB+ each) and vast amounts of NAS
storage. Accelerators are deployed in the best routing and switching
fabric (Force 10) and the best load-balancers (F5 Networks) available
(and always will be)."
They've also leveraged hundreds of DTrace probes to further optimize their environment. Amazingly, they're offering free Accelerators for OpenSocial and Facebook applications. This is a great way for social/media applications to get started; they can enjoy the powerful Joyent stack from the beginning, and if they happen to grow to thousands of hits per second, they can simply sign on for a contract and crank up the capacity as needed.
And these guys know Rails; in fact, several Joyent employees are or were members of the Rails Core 
Team. Not suprisingly, their other core product, Connector, is one of the most extensive uses of the Rails framework yet. Connector is an open-source, web-based collaboration suite providing things like email, contacts, calendars, bookmarks, scheduling, tagging, RSS, and search functionality. The software itself is free, but you'll need a web host and some storage to make it useful. Ah, what a perfect example of complimenting products.. run it on the Joyent cloud! Technologies like this are what makes the next generation workplace (one where I can do my work from anywhere) possible.
Joyent also runs OpenID servers to provide its applications and developers a common authentication service. I'll keep it short (if you don't already know what OpenID is, you need to get with the times), but basically it provides a true single sign-on ability for web applications. This is huge, since we already have way too many credentials floating around, and the number of web apps is multiplying every day. A good description of how it works can be found here.
