Topic: Cloud Computing

Getting CloudTools to Work with Grails 1.1.1

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, December 22, 2009 @ 4:46 pm

photo credit: °Florian

Yes, Cloud Foundry has been acquired by Spring Source and seems to be morphing into a for-pay service, and there hasn't been a new build packaged on the Cloud Tools project page since January of 2009, but if you dig in the SVN repo, you see there's a bit of activity. Before I try building from source, I wanted to see how hard it would be to get 0.6 Grails plugin working with a Grails 1.1.1 app.

Well, harder than I thought. There's a real lack of documentation around cloudtools for one, and the radio silence on the project page over the last few months hasn't helped. Fortunately, Don over at AlterThought has put together a nice post that covers most of the pitfalls and problems with the CloudTools Grails Plugin. A few things they don't address and I thought I'd throw in here:

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News Rollup for the Week of November 17, 2008

Dietrich Kappe, Sunday, November 23, 2008 @ 2:19 pm

Two major bits of news from this week:

• Amazon has gone live with their new CDN (Content Delivery Network), CloudFront. Think Akamai for the rest of us. Pay as you go, hooks into S3. If you want to get a jump start on this, get yourself the latest version (0.4.5) of S3Fox, the S3 addon for FireFox. Getting started is easy: sign up for CloudFront (or sign up for Amazon Web Services if you haven't already, then sign up for CloudFront), create a bucket, put content in it, make it publicly readable, create a 'distribution', enable it and map a CNAME to the cloudfront.net hostname that corresponds to the distribution. We'll be doing some testing of the Amazon CDN over the next few weeks and do a review.
• Adobe AIR 1.5 has been released. Among the improvements: encrypted local database, Flash Player 10 support (no H.264 for Flash 10, though ), and an update to the WebKit bundled with Air. InfoQ has a nice summary of the Adobe MAX Air 1.5 buzz.

If you've got any news that you'd like to announce, ping us at ajax@pathf.com.

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Everything’s Coming Up Windows

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, October 30, 2008 @ 7:07 pm

I've been beating the drum of cloud computing and the advantage that it gives to companies building solutions on Linux. Microsoft needed to respond. Well, now we have two solutions for Windows on demand:

• Amazon EC2 is offering Windows on EC2, with the pricing at $0.125 per hour for a small instance running Windows Server (as compared to $0.10 for a Linux instance). You can run SQL Server Express at no extra charge. The SQL Server Standard smallest instance (Stadard Large) rings in at $1.10 per hour, however, which ain't such a good deal.
• Microsoft's Azure Services Platform. It's still in community evaluation mode, but there is one thing that is already clear about it: it's as confusing as all git out. One of the advantages of Amazon's services like S3 and EC2 is that they are simple and can form the building blocks for other applications and services.

If I'm provisioning a web application, I'm pretty comfortable thinking in terms of virtual servers or instances. Not sure how to think about scaling and cost with Azure. I think MS would have done better to start out with a KISS approach to drive adoption. Time will tell if their "it can cure cancer" approach will work out.

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Microsoft to Jump on Board EC2

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, October 2, 2008 @ 12:57 pm

Hold on to your hats; Microsoft has just made a radical change in business model. A couple of months ago I wrote about the competitive advantage that firms using Linux and Amazon's EC2 cloud computing had over their competitors.

Server-on-demand providers like Amazon's EC2, Joyent,
and others have reduced the capital necessary to launch scalable,
server intensive businesses. Google has just launched a similar
on-demand service, and companies like RightScale and CohesiveFT are building mature businesses around managing EC2 configurations.

...

Facebook applications are just the most extreme example of business initiatives that can be scaled on demand from $70/month on one EC2 server to $10,000/month on many dozens of servers running web, application and database server clusters and farms. Compare that with the old school of investing in a large data center with a significant fraction of the hardware and bandwidth that you might need if your business is a success. What used to cost $100k in capital can now be done with just a few hundreds of dollars.

...

And it's all possible as long as you are using a unix variant - Linux for the most part - to power your apps. So there is a whole class of companies out there using Linux that can out compete their Windows-using rivals - again, the capital they need to launch is much smaller because of cloud computing. That means Linux will win among the class of young entrepreneurial businesses that are so vital to the US economy.

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