Deploying and running Grails in the cloud

Deploying and running Grails applications in the cloud Prepared for SF Grails Café Centro Feb 2011 Meetup by Philip Stehlik and Michael Salera Thanks to Taulia for hosting and food!!

Agenda
Promise of the cloud
Different options for deploying and running Grails apps
Deploying to AWS via CloudFoundry
Deploying to Google App Engine
Deploying to AWS via Elastic Beanstalk (Mike)
Challenges/Bottom line

"Cloud computing is location-independent computing, whereby shared servers provide resources, software, and data to computers and other devices on demand, as with the electricity grid." - wikipedia
Shared resources
Not bound to physical resources
On-demand
And guys; its nothing like the electricity grid!

The different clouds

The different clouds
Google App Engine
Rackspace Cloud
IBM Cloud
VMware vCloud
Microsoft Azure
Amazon Web Services
Virtual Private Cloud
Private Cloud
...

'Virtual Hardware' VS 'Virtual Runtime'
Virtual Hardware
Complete stack (hardware, OS, servers, apps etc)
Some limitations in hardware
Any OS, any JDK, python, PHP etc
Any app-server
Take care of scaling single machines yourself
Pay as you go and hard 'root servers'
Virtual Runtime
Runtime/Platform oriented
Shared runtime environment
Limitations in runtime features (security etc)
Specific runtime environment
Scalable runtime environment
Pay as you go

Categories of providers
"shared servers provide resources, software, and data"
Platform as a service different from infrastructure as a service
Virtual hardware - Infrastructure as a service
vCloud
EC2
RackSpace Cloud
Virtual 'runtime' - Platform as a service
Google App Engine
Elastic Bean Stalk (hybrid, kind of)
Microsoft Azure

So let's get started!

Two domains with scaffolded controllers
User
Post
Nothing fancy!!
Deploy this to different 'cloud providers'
https://github.com/pstehlik/sfgrails0802-base
Basic app example

Basic app example

Amazon EC2 via Cloud Foundry
Intro:
Wrapper around EC2
Cloud Foundry acquired by SpringSource acquired by VMware
CloudFoundry uses cloud-tools Apache2 licensed cloud management tools (https://www.cloudfoundry.com/cloudtools.html)
Deploys to EC2/EBS with their own AMIs
Grails plugin
Prerequisites:
AWS account (CloudFoundry deploys to EC2 & EBS)
CloudFoundry account (www.cloudfoundry.com)

Details Cloud Foundry
Deploys to EC2
Files (.war etc) are stored on your S3 storage
Pre-packaged AMIs from Cloud Foundry
Tomcat 5.5, tcServer, eXoECM, Liferay
MySQL
Initialization scripts - script to execute upon startup
Grails plugin uses their API to deploy

Deploying via Cloud Foundry
grails install-plugin cloud-foundry
configure mysql automatically? - yes
Add CloudFoundry credentials
grails war
grails cloud-foundry-deploy
https://github.com/pstehlik/sfgrails0802-base/tree/cloudfoundry

showtime

Cloud Foundry gotchas
It does not automatically set your DataSource.groovy (even though it tells you it does)
Solution: Look at the plugin directory and copy over the details. user: <appname>-user, password: <appname>-password etc.
MySQL user names can be up to 16 characters long (that's not what the Cloud Foundry error message says...)
If your <appname> is too long the MySQL deployment will not work with the '-user' added.
Solution: Change the app's name in the CloudFoundry.groovy and change in DataSource.groovy

Google App Engine
Intro:
Platform as a Service
Started for python, Java support since 2009
BigTable (No MySQL)
Run by ... Google
Prerequisites:
GAE account
Have GAE SDK installed (http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html)

Deploy on Google App Engine
grails uninstall-plugin tomcat
grails install-plugin app-engine
choose 'jpa' for persistence
GORM no more... but gorm-jpa plugin helps a bit
g rails install-plugin gorm-jpa
Annotate Domains
Make sure all queries, transactions etc are working
For the example app -> fix bootstrap
https://github.com/pstehlik/sfgrails0802-base/tree/gae-jpa

showtime

Google App Engine Gotchas
No more hibernate
No more gorm (gorm-jpa maybe)
No file system access
No full J2EE runtime
No more than 10 apps (i heard)
No renaming of your app
No ...
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/jrewhitelist.html
Scaffolding that comes with Grails plugin doesn't work
I am not smart enough for JPA on GAE
But: Lots of automatic scale stuff

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk
Intro
Console style front-end to Amazon WS
Standard Java - Apache / MySQL / Tomcat on 64-bit Linux
Eclipse Integration
Benefits
Users can think in 'versions'
as opposed to EBS snapshots, EC2 instances and AMIs, etc.
Simplifies choices, management
Advanced Users can customize low-level services
Automagic DNS assignment - a la AppEngine
http://myapp.elasticbeanstalk.com/

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk - V2 App example - Blogger

Elastic Beanstalk App example - Travel Log

Deploy Custom AMI on Amazon EC2
Alternative for 'Cloud SysAdmin' types (IaaS)
Deploy WAR files using scp or EC2 plug-in for Firefox
Management console, SSH Access, Snapshots for backup
'Canonical' Java Stack :
Ubuntu 10 Server (32)
Tomcat 6.0.29
MySQL
Apache 2.2.x
EC2 Dashboard - Manage Instances, IPs, Load balancers

Challenges Opportunities
New and unknown environments
What to choose?
Which provider?
Platform as a Service or Infrastructure as a Service?
Support for all features not 100% there
Watch out for cost! Make sure to scale down!
No unified method of cloud computing available -> You might get locked in if you are not careful
Especially platform as a service binds you to the platform specifics

Bottom Line
Deploying your app in the cloud is easy
Throwing your app into the clouds can be lots of effort
It's OK to only port parts of your applications as a trial
Easy to get started with green-field projects
Different providers have different target groups
It's so easy to scale up
It's free to get started

Contact
Philip Stehlik
http://pstehlik.com - p @pstehlik.com
Michael Salera
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-salera/7/374/779 -
[email_address]
http://sfgrails.com @sfgrails Thanks to Taulia for hosting and food!!

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Deploying and running Grails in the cloud

by Philip Stehlik on Feb 09, 2011

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