Typica 1.5 has just been released.

This version brings a lot of new stuff like:

• EC2 enhancements: support for EU and regions,
• SDB enhancements: support for SQL like grammar (select, etc.),
• Bug fixes…
• … and of course the FPS API we’ve been working on.

As Amazon announced plenty of FPS Quick Starts, you now don’t have any excuse for not using the FPS API when developing in Java.

Elastic Grid team will do a talk for QCon London 09, titled Dynamic deployment and scalability for the cloud on March, 10th at 3:30pm.

The abstract for this session:

Cloud Computing providers allow a fantastic way to deploy scalable machine images easily and on demand. However, there is a finer grain of scalability that must be provided, allowing individual application assets to easily scale to meet the demands of a running system. Our session discusses the Elastic Grid, an approach that provides dynamic allocation, management and scalability of applications through the cloud.

Intrinsic to the Elastic Grid are a set of dynamic capabilities and reliance on Policy-based and Quality of Service mechanisms that extend capabilities currently found in available cloud computing technologies.

Being able to inject rules & policies into cloud focused infrastructure allows greater automation, scalability and controlled behavior. Ultimately, cloud based deployments can provide advanced capabilities surrounding self-healing, self optimization & self configuration. The Elastic Grid provides an approach using a cloud focused Domain Specific Language to declaratively include behavior as SLA policy declarations.

Discover how to easily deploy your Java applications (but not only!) on the Cloud (especially Amazon EC2) during this BoF with both an introduction to how Elastic Grid ease deployments, a real demo done live and some feedback from real uses cases.

The slides used for Devoxx have changed a lot from the ones we used to use for the past events. The demonstration was also different (no more video conversion demo but instead a Spring dm Server deployment). We will do our best to provide soon a screencast of the demo we did so that you can get an idea of what we did during the BoF.

Thanks for all of you who could come. We had some really interesting discussions after the talk. Devoxx is really a good place where to be in. Lots of interesting talks and really good opportunity for networking. It’s always a pleasure to put a face on a name.

Tomorrow morning is the day for the joint-conference with Amazon Technology Evanglist, Simone Brunozzi, so don’t forget to come for the conference at 9:30am.

It sounds like that Devoxx is going to be full of interesting news in the Cloud Computing World.

First of all if you missed it, Amazon just announced support for Amazon EC2 in Europe!

This is really good news as this was something slowing adoption of Cloud Computing in Europe. Many customers needed their servers to be running in Europe.

Their pricing model sounds quite reasonable to, although I really don’t understand why European customers have to pay more than the US customers. Anyway, all they have to work on now is a way to bill in EUR instead of USD. Support for FPS and DevPay with EUR currencies is a must have too.

So congrats to Amazon for that release, and for Sun Network.com initiative, rest in peace (what a pity… this could really have been something interesting if done differently).

Elastic Grid will do a joint presentation with Amazon at Devoxx with Simone Brunozzi (Amazon Technology Evangelist in Europe) on December, 12th at 9:30am.

This conference will introduce you to Amazon Cloud Computing services, like EC2, S3 and CloudFront. During the conference we will also explain you how to deploy applications on EC2, but also how Elastic Grid helps Java developers to easily deploy and scale their applications.

Update: the slides have been published!

We are thrilled to be present this year in Antwerp, Belgium for Devoxx. Our talk, Dynamic deployment and scalability for the cloud will be on Monday, 8th at 9:00pm.

We really hope to see you there for one of the biggest Java developers event in Europe.

Here is the abstract of our session:

Cloud Computing providers allow a fantastic way to deploy scalable machine images easily and on demand. However, there is a finer grain of scalability that must be provided, allowing individual application assets to easily scale to meet the demands of a running system. Our session discusses the Elastic Grid, an approach that provides dynamic allocation, management and scalability of applications through the cloud.

Intrinsic to the Elastic Grid are a set of dynamic capabilities and reliance on Policy-based and Quality of Service mechanisms that extend capabilities currently found in available cloud computing technologies

Being able to inject rules & policies into cloud focused infrastructure allows greater automation, scalability and controlled behavior. Ultimately, cloud based deployments can provide advanced capabilities surrounding self-healing, self optimization & self configuration. The Elastic Grid provides an approach using a cloud focused Domain Specific Language to declaratively include behavior as SLA policy declarations.

Discover how to easily deploy your Java applications (but not only!) on the Cloud (especially Amazon EC2) during this BoF with both an introduction to how Elastic Grid ease deployments, a real demo done live and some feedback from real uses cases.

If you’re in the SaaS (Software as a Service) business, and are following the Cloud Computing trends, you really need to understand the difference between the offers. Of course, I’m not talking about Cloud, like Apple’s Mobile , but only Cloud Computing.

As of today, we have at least 3 big players (Amazon, Google and Microsoft) and some other ones from smaller players (like GoGrid, Flexiscale and Mosso to name a few of them). What is really important when choosing a Cloud Computing Platform is to understand what they offer and how they are different from each others. Of course the pricing models can vary quite a lot, with some providers offering SLAs, some offering virtualized hardware whereas some others one mean real hardware, etc.

But more than that, what really matters is do you need an infrastructure or a plaform, or if you’re fond of acronyms, are you the IaaS guy or the PaaS one?

That question is really important as it’s not easy to switch from one to the other.

Let’s explain the difference by analyzing the Cloud Computing offers from the 3 big players named above.

Google, through it’s App Engine offer, enable you to host your websites and your data on the Cloud and enable you to use some of their successful services like BigTable. What is important to understand is their pricing model and their APIs/Services. Two things are important to note :

• You can only host Python applications (erh… web applications) as of today and you pay per bandwidth, storage and CPU used for hosting this web application,
• You can easily integrate with other Google Services and Google Accounts.

Microsoft, offers a way to host your .Net applications on the Cloud with a pricing model yet to be officially announced, and offers integration with some Microsoft services/applications.

Amazon on the other end, does not offer a way to host your web applications out-of-the-box on the Cloud, but simply provide virtualized hardware on which you can do whatever you’d like to (well, as usual it’s it a bit more complex than that, but that’s pretty much it).

So basically, Google and Microsoft offers are PaaS solutions: they offer a Platform on which you can deploy your applications. On the other end, Amazon offers an IaaS solution: an Infrastructure which you can use.

So your choice has to be made carefully and need to analyze:

• Vendor Lock-in: if you deploy on Google or Microsoft Clouds, you make a choice on both technologies and with which services you’d like to integrate,
• Ease of Use: deploying a web application is easier to do than deploying and managing a complete infrastructure,
• PaaS or IaaS: do you want the Cloud Provider to offer you a way to host your applications (if you can accomadate with their technical restrictions) or an infrastructure allowing you to host your applications (without restrictions) the way you want?

I guess, it must be quite clear from this blog post that I’m not really fond of PaaS. Surely IaaS means more work for the customer, but you’re the one in charge of that virtualized infrastructure, allowing you to deploy complex applications on the Cloud, something I guess most of the time you won’t be able to do with the PaaS approach.

On the other end, if your goals are integration with Google and Microsoft services and you want to make sure you Gadget (don’t know the word for Microsoft sites) can scale, then it makes sense to deploy on those platforms.

In case you missed it, Amazon announced last Thursday an impressive list of features:

• EC2 for Windows (with/without SQL server), althrough they are some specifics which differs from the Linux version; more information on RightScale blog post.
• Amazon EC2 is no more a beta with SLAs for Amazon EC2,
• Management console,
• Cloud Monitoring service,
• Load-balancing and automatic scaling features.

Also worth reading an interesting paper from The Economist on Cloud Computing.

The slides of the BoF on Elastic Grid and EC2 are finally available!

Thanks for all of you who could come. We had some interesting discussions and feedback after the talk.
This is the first time I had a chance to go to JavaZone and I must say it’s been quite interesting. A few friends and I had the opportunity to discuss with Tom J. Bang who gave us the opportunity to taste local stuff.

I also had the opportunity to discuss with a lot of people there: my friends from our local user group (Guillaume Laforge, Julien Viet, Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine, Jerome Lacoste) but also Scott Davis and Eitan Suez. (Sorry for all the other ones I forgot to cite.)

For those of you who could not make it for our BoF session, the organizers of the JavaZone event will provide a video. I’ll update the blog when the video is available.

Update: the slides have been published! I finally did not demonstrate the FPS webapp and added more fresh content on the presentation. The demo part of the talk has also been improved a lot as it is now even easier to use Elastic Grid. The webcast is supposed to be provided at some point. I’ll update this blog post when the video is available.

I will be doing a talk like the one we did for JavaOne 08, except this time the demo will a bit shorten compared to the one we did at JavaOne. I will also demonstrate the Amazon FPS webapp we’ve been working on (more about this to come soon on this blog).

Our talk How Can Amazon EC2 Benefit from the Elastic Grid Solution? is scheduled on September 18th (2nd day of the JavaZone conference) at 3:45pm in Lab 6.

If you are in Oslo for JavaZone this year, let me know. I would be pleased to see you and discuss anything like AWS, Elastic Grid, or even for drinking a beer :-p