Elastic Grid Blog

Update: the slides have been published!

Dennis Reedy and I have been selected as speakers for JavaOne 08.

Here is the abstract of our session called How can Amazon EC2 benefic from the Elastic Grid solution?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides a fantastic way to deploy scalable machine images, but what to do when you want an application to scale across the machine images you have provisioned? This session discusses the Elastic Grid, an approach that provides dynamic allocation, management, and scalability of applications, using Amazon EC2 as the backbone. It also introduces the open-source technologies Elastic Grid is based on: Rio and Apache River (Jini™ network technology).The Elastic Grid provides an architecture for developing, deploying, and managing distributed applications composed of services. Key to the architecture are a set of dynamic capabilities and reliance on policy-based and quality-of-service mechanisms. The Elastic Grid reduces the complexity surrounding the development of dynamic services by introducing Jini network technology remoting for POJOs as well as by providing a simple component model.

The Elastic Grid extends Amazon EC2’s virtual grid environment, enabling users to manage and dynamically scale Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) based on declarable SLAs, as well as deal with partial failure of AMI instances. Rio reduces the complexity surrounding the development of dynamic services by introducing dynamic Jini network technology remoting for POJOs, as well as providing a simple component model.

The presentation demonstrates how IntelliJ plug-ins for Amazon EC2 and Rio ease building and deploying a sample application distributed over the Amazon EC2 grid. With the Elastic Grid solution, the application will scale on the Amazon EC2 grid by starting and stopping Amazon EC2 instances accordingly to declared SLAs (service-level agreements).

We hope to see you there!

We have released a few days ago a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA allowing you to control your Rio environment.

Basically this plugin allows to deploy new services, undeploy them and visually watch the state of the deployments. You can also launch administration UI of the services, which also mean increasing/trimming the number of instances of your services.

There is a screenshot of this plugin in the dedicated page.

Today, we have been able to use a custom AMI in order to run Rio on many Amazon EC2 instances.

The test we did was quite simple: one instance of our Amazon image (let’s call it server1) ran Rio (rio start all), whereas another instance (let’s call it server2) ran CLI (Rio command-line interface). Multicast being disabled between Amazon EC2 instances, we had to use a Unicast lookup. This can be done in CLI with the following command:
set locators jini://PRIVATE_DNS_NAME_OF_RIO_SERVER_1

We were able to list from server2 the services running on server1. CLI uses the default ServiceDiscoveryManager settings, so when we stop Rio on server1, we had to wait 10 minutes before the services disappeared.

So, do not forget to customize your Rio/Jini environment when using Amazon EC2.

We will soon provide a public AMI, with a customized Rio distribution tuned for Amazon EC2.

Update: there is now a tutorial for running Rio on Amazon EC2 and Rio AMI!

As explained on the right sidebar, this is a fresh new blog whose content is going to be related to the Elastic Grid solution (work in progress) and by extension Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon SQS, Rio and Jini.

Some interesting screencasts should come soon, so stay tuned!