Thank you for always using Nuita.

We have carried out a major overhaul of Nuita’s internal systems. Since this update is mainly focused on improvements “under the hood,” you won’t notice much visual change, but it lays an important foundation for more stable operations and future feature additions.

Framework and Library Updates

We updated Ruby on Rails, the web framework that powers Nuita, to the latest version, 8.0.4. This allows us to apply security patches and expect more stable behavior.

We also migrated the frontend build system from Webpacker to a new setup, making JavaScript and CSS processing faster. npm packages such as Bootstrap have also been updated to their latest versions.

Moving Away from AWS Services and Simplifying the System

Until now, Nuita ran on a combination of various managed services from Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, to reduce operating costs and improve maintainability, we migrated to a simpler configuration.

  • Retiring Elasticsearch: We retired Elasticsearch, which we used as our full-text search engine, and switched to MariaDB’s full-text search feature. There’s no major change to the search experience, but infrastructure complexity has been greatly reduced.

  • Changing the job queue: We migrated our background job processing infrastructure from AWS SQS + Shoryuken to delayed_job. Asynchronous processes such as sending notifications now run on a simpler mechanism.

  • Retiring DynamoDB: We retired the NoSQL database (DynamoDB) that was used for some data storage and consolidated it into our RDBMS. This improves data consistency and makes queries easier to optimize.

  • Retiring Docker/Capistrano/Selenium: We also simplified our development, deployment, and testing environments, reducing the maintenance burden.

Reorganizing Routing and Controllers

We clearly separated the URL namespaces for the logged-out (public) state and the logged-in state (under member/). We’ve unified everything around a RESTful resource design, making it easier to add features and build out APIs going forward.

Added an Announcements Feature

We added an Announce model for displaying announcements from the operating team. Going forward, we’ll be able to share important announcements directly on the site when needed.

The date shown on each Nweet (post) is now a link, so clicking it takes you to that Nweet’s individual page (permalink). This is handy when you want to share a specific post.

In Closing

While these changes aren’t very visible on the surface, this was an important round of refactoring to pay down technical debt and run Nuita more stably going forward.

If you notice any issues, please let us know through the contact form. Thank you for continuing to use Nuita.