The document discusses strategies for deploying and running Grails applications in various cloud environments, including AWS, Google App Engine, and Elastic Beanstalk, highlighting the differences between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). It provides practical steps for deployment, potential challenges, and considerations for app scalability and provider selection. The bottom line emphasizes that while deploying to the cloud can be straightforward, it may entail substantial effort and thoughtful planning.

1. 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!!

3. 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

4. "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!

5. The different clouds

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

7. '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

8. 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

9. So let's get started!

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

11. Basic app example

12. 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)

13. 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

14. 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

15. Deploying via Cloud Foundry

16. Deploying via Cloud Foundry

17. Deploying via Cloud Foundry showtime

18. 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

19. 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)

20. 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

21. Deploy on Google App Engine

22. Deploy on Google App Engine

23. Deploy on Google App Engine showtime

24. 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

25. 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/

26. Amazon Elastic Beanstalk - V2 App example - Blogger

27. Elastic Beanstalk App example - Travel Log

28. 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

29. 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

30. 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

31. 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!!