Re: WO and Clouds
Re: WO and Clouds
- Subject: Re: WO and Clouds
- From: "John Bruce" <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 14:25:44 +1000
I think it depends on what is meant by cloud computing. There is such
a wide range of different providers out there and all offering the
promise of instant scalability. I've looked into this a various times
over the last year and there's something that doesn't sit right with
me about Amazon WS as a production hosting platform for tradition 3
tier web applications like the ones WebObjects is designed to be used
for. There is an interesting blog entry looking at this from Joyent
(http://www.joyent.com - providers of another type of cloud hosting
platform):
http://www.joyeur.com/2008/05/15/amazon-web-services-or-joyent-accelerators-reprise
Given that you can now get static IPs for your EC2 instances you could
resolve the dynaminic IP problem and also put together some deployment
recipes together so that Web Server instances could talk to App Server
instances. But how best to handle the database? Originally I wasn't a
fan of doing snapshots and saving to S3 as, what happens when the DB
instance crashes and you haven't saved for a while. There is a new
feature, or will soon be, where you can mount a block level storage
device to an EC2 instance which would help solve that problem. But
what about the latency of dealing with S3. I'm just not sure I want my
storage system to be run via web services when I am running a
database.
Contrast this to running the database on a Solaris Zone via the Joyent
Accerlator service. I can save the database to disk and then make
backups to the NFS mounted volume. The disk uses ZFS so I'm unlikely
to lose data if the server crashes (as well as having an actual server
rather than a virtual one!). I can buy more space as needed on the NFS
volume so that's ok for future expansion. Also there are a wider range
of containers available. I can rent a whole Sun server with 32GB of
ram and 8 cores if I want or just one with 1/4 GB of ram and 1/16th of
a core. I could have two of then and cluster my FrontBase database
between them. All the servers have static IPs and internal LAN
addresses. (One thing I don't like, and this is more a feature of
Soalris non root containers, is that I can't control the firewall
settings - although I can ask for custom policies to be installed on
the router / load balancer).
If anyone is interested I have notes on how to install WebObjects
5.3.3 with mod_webobjects, Apache 2.2.x, Java 1.6 and FrontBase 4.2.x
on a Joyent Accelerator.
I definitely think that virtualization is a good option. It provides a
good way to separate out the different sections of a WebObjects app.
Personally I like Solaris Zones and OpenSolaris is growing on me as a
server platform. But at the moment I'm not convinced that running a
virtual server with an infrastucture based around web services can
really work in this context.
On the other hand I'm sure Amazon WS is useful for other kinds of
situations and would work well if a different kind of database was
used. Some thoughts I had on this are creating an EOAdaptor for Simple
DB or Couch DB or even a direct interface for Erlang's Mnesia
database.
At the end of the day it all depends on your problem domain but the
whole make you app and deploy with instant scalability seems too good
to be true.
-John Bruce
On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 1:40 AM, Alex Cone <email@hidden> wrote:
> Here's a new for the "deploying WO on an unusual platform" discussions...
>
> Has anyone ever deployed a WO app on a cloud computing platform?
>
> I'm looking at Morph AppSpace for Java (http://www.mor.ph/java/) or
> cloudtools (http://code.google.com/p/cloudtools/)...
>
> Seems like a "roll all frameworks into your WAR deployment and deploy under
> Tomcat" should just work.
>
> Anyone done anything like this?
>
> abc
>
> __alex cone
> ceo codefab inc
> 212 465-8484 x101
> email@hidden
> http://www.codefab.com
>
> If you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much space.
>
>
>
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