An introduction to Apache JClouds, featuring the compute service API and blobstore.

1. Apache JClouds
Cloud interfaces, simplified
Hiranya Jayathilaka
Dept. of Computer Science, UCSB
S

2. Roadmap
S Cloud computing
S Challenges
S Apache JClouds
S Demo
S Pros and cons
S Summary and conclusion

3. The Cloud Revolution
S Cloud computing is revolutionizing the way software is
developed and delivered.
S Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
S Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
S Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

4. Many Benefits
S Cost effective
S Reduced maintenance overhead
S Easy and fast provisioning – Improved time-to-market
S Autoscaling and elasticity
S Fault tolerance

5. The Other Side of the Coin

6. Challenges
S How do you select the cloud provider that’s right for you?
S How do you port your application from one cloud provider
to another?
S How to develop multi-cloud applications?

7. Enter, JClouds
S An open source library that facilitates developing
applications for a wide range of cloud providers.
S Implement your application using JClouds, and run it on
your favorite cloud without any code changes.
S Simple, intuitive APIs.
S Java and Clojure support.

8. History
S Started in March 2009 by Adrian Cole as an open source project.
S Initially based in London, developed mostly by European Java
community.
S Contributed to Apache in April 2013.
S http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/jcloudsProposal
S Already popular in the industry – Used by the likes of Adobe,
CloudBees, RedHat, Twitter and SalesForce.
S http://jclouds.incubator.apache.org/documentation/reference/
apps-that-use-jclouds/

9. Getting Started
S No binary download J
S The documentation provides the necessary configurations
for popular project management tools, so JClouds can be
included in your project as a dependency.
S Maven
S ANT
S Leiningen

10. JClouds APIs
S Compute Service API
S For managing compute nodes (VMs) in the cloud
S Blobstore API
S For storing data in the cloud

11. Compute Service API
S Key abstractions
S Hardware
S Operating system
S Template
S Supported providers
S AWS (EC2), Bluelock, CloudSigma, ElasticHosts, Go2Cloud,
GoGrid, Green House Data, HP, Ninefold, OpenHosting,
Rackspace, ServerLove, SkaliCloud, SoftLayer, Stratogen,
TRMK, TryStack

12. Starting a VM from an Image

13. If You Don’t Have an Image?

14. More Control Over Templates

15. Access VM Metadata

16. SSH to Remote VM

17. Dealing with Package Managers

18. Managing Clusters

19. Blobstore API
S Key abstractions
S Container
S Folder
S Blob
S Supported providers
S AWS (S3), CloudOne, HP, Azure, Ninefold, Rackspace,
Synaptic

20. Downloading a Blob

21. Write Blob

22. Upload File

23. Access Blob Metadata

24. Logging Support

25. Demonstration
S Scenario
S Start an Ubuntu VM in EC2
S Upload a Python script and a Java application to the VM (Java
application also based on JClouds)
S Install Python and JRE on the VM using apt-get
S Run the Java application on the VM to download a data file
from S3
S Run the Python script on the data file
S Upload the output to S3

26. Pros
S Powerful abstractions: Simple + High-level + Convention over configuration
S Location awareness baked into the API
S Easily manage clusters of nodes
S Excellent portability
S Unit testable
S Free and open source (ASL 2.0)
S “It just works” (YMMV)

27. Cons
S Still in the Apache Incubator
S Limited documentation
S Potential “Jar hell”

28. Summary
S Cloud computing brings a horde of benefits – But the
diversity can be overwhelming.
S Several challenges with respect to evaluating cloud vendors
and porting application across cloud platforms.
S Apache JClouds provides a simple and feature-rich
approach for developing cloud applications that are easily
portable across multiple vendors.

29. Thank You & Questions

30. References
S Project website: http://jclouds.incubator.apache.org
S Apache Incubator proposal:
http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/jcloudsProposal
S Getting started:
http://jclouds.incubator.apache.org/documentation/
gettingstarted/
S Demo code: https://github.com/hiranya911/jclouds-demo