Elastic Grid Blog

Last friday I presented Elastic Grid to the local Java Open Source developers group called OSSGTP. The audience of this group usually is made of skilled Java developers working on many famous Java projects, such as Spring, Hibernate, XWiki, eXo Portal, Restlet, jGuard, JCapthcha, etc (sorry, I probably forgot to cite many of them…).

This talk lasted 2 hours and half and was really interesting because of its format: this session was highly interactive and I was asked many questions about AWS and Elastic Grid.

The content of the talk was pretty much the same as the one Dennis and I did at JavaOne, except that I added two other demonstrations illustrating what EG (Elastic Grid) brings to the developers for ease of deployment of JEE applications. The first demonstration illustrated a deployment of XWiki whereas the second one was focused on eXo Portal.

For both demonstrations, I showed how EG is actively monitoring the processes it started when deploying the applications/servers. I simulated some crashes by killing some applications servers and could explain how the application servers were handled.

The feedback I received the day after, such as the blog post from Nicolas Martignole (in French only, sorry…), was really great and I truly thank all the participants.

Many news related to the Elastic Grid project should come soon, so stay tuned :=)

During JavaOne 08, it’s been hard to update the blog. Here are below all the interesting things you may have missed.

Entries about Amazon Web Services:

• JBoss AMI - Ubuntu, Apache and JBoss. When Elastic Grid will be released, you won’t need to use a AMI per kind of application/environment you are trying to set up. More on that explained on the BoF slides and the screencast to come.
• Browser Uploads to S3 using HTML POST Forms - Interesting article from James Murty, the author of JetS3t.
• Processing Pipeline with Amazon S3, SQS, EC2, Ruby, Rails and ActiveMessaging
• Building for Performance and Reliability with Amazon SimpleDB
• SQS-EC2 Job Processor Sample - Quite similar to the demo we made during the BoF on EC2 and Elastic Grid at JavaOne 08.
• Sample application to get started with Amazon SQS and Amazon EC2
• dotCMS : Open Source Web Content Management System - Although the idea of pulling the latest version of the app from Subversion may sound interesting, I see more problems than solutions with that approach; what would happen if someone commits something broken into Subversion?
• Beta release of S3 copy feature
• Tips for Securing Your EC2 Instance
• Redundant Disk Storage Across Multiple EC2 nodes - Useful until most of us can use the Persistent Storage feature and probably still useful after that depending on your needs

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, and even though Dennis has to come home tonight, I will stay in San Francisco up to the 13th, so feel free to get in touch with me if you’d like to discuss or have some other demo.

For those of you who could not make it for our BoF session, as I said during the talk, the plan is to make a screencast available shortly after I come back home, in Paris, France.

P.S.: of course this presentation is made available from Amazon S3…

 Entries about Amazon Web Services:

• Amazon lowers data transfer costs! This price cut is especially interesting if you do transfer from outside of Amazon infrastructure more than 40TB of data per month. They also introduced a new tier.

Entries about Amazon Web Services:

• Persistent storage for EC2: as announced on AWS blog, but also here and here!
• Amazon announced a Service Health Dashboard and some Paid Support options, although the pricing model won’t fit for everone.
• Some new success stories: Assay Depot, Digitaria, The Talk Market, Familybuilder.com, and Animato, via AWS Blog.
• Tarzan: PHP5 modules for S3, EC2 and SQS.
• ActionScript3 library for SimpleDB.
  

As said previously, I’m going to JavaOne this year for a BoF on Elastic Grid.

I will arrive at San Francisco on April, 30th and leave by May, 13th.

If you’d like to talk to me when I’m there, feel free to drop me an email at jerome DOT bernard AT elastic-grid DOT com.

I would be pleased talking with you about Amazon services, Rio and Jini, or whatever else…

Entries about Amazon Web Services:

• Right_AWS 1.7.1 released - Ruby library for SDB, EC2, S3, and SQS
• Article on Python Persistence in SimpleDB

Entries about Amazon Web Services:

• sdb-browser: Amazon SimpleDB data browser/editor.
• FPyS: an Amazon FPS client for Python.
• Dekoh: Amazon EC2 case study, via AWS Blog.
• Articles about using Amazon S3 persistent Ruby objects and an extended version using Amazon SDB.
• Interesting article explaining why you should load CPU instead of storage.
• Video screencast for Getting Started with Amazon S3 using the S3 Fox Firefox plugin.

Entries about Amazon Web Services:

• Amazon Fulfillment Web Service: two sets of APIs used in order to track shipments to Amazon fulfillment centers and from Amazon fulfillment center to the customers, via AWS Blog.
• boto 1.1a: a new release of boto, the Python library for Amazon Web Services, is now available…

Entries about Amazon Web Services:

• Happy Birthday, Amazon S3! 14 billions of objects as of Jan 2008.
• SimplerDB is an in-memory Ruby implementation of Amazon‘s SimpleDB REST API. You can use it to test your application offline (for free!) or experiment with SimpleDB without a beta account.