Getting Your Groovy On with Grails and Cloud Computing

Groovy on Grails is catching on in the Java community and it is building steam

Aug. 21, 2008 06:00 AM

David Abramowski's Blog

You need to think of cloud computing in three different layers - infrastructure, infrastructure management & platform as a service. At the infrastructure level you have the basis for cloud computing. This is where you'll find virtual servers or services like Amazon.com EC2. A level above the infrastructure layer you find companies that provide tools to help developers deal with managing their own systems running on top of the infrastructure layer. The third layer is Platform as a Service and is where Morph plays.

Groovy on Grails is catching on in the Java community and it is building steam. We have seen several positive posts about deploying Grails applications to Morph AppSpace and there is even a new plugin someone in the community created to make things even easier. (thank you for that!) Here at Morph Labs, we want to be the place to go when Grails developers think about deploying business quality applications and web sites. We want to make your deployment of your application as quick and easy as programming with Groovy/Grails.

Why do I say "business quality" you may ask? Well our Platform as a Service provides the capabilities a developer needs to deploy, deliver and manage an application. Think of the Morph AppSpace subscription like an IT department for your application. It goes far beyond a host or a virtual server. As a matter of fact, in the Morph world we never even really talk about servers, we talk about compute power needed to run an application (we call these cubes). And we can scale that power on the fly....it's our unique value add in addition to the collection of services we provide from a technology & human standpoint. Regarding scale - imagine that - scale your application within minutes just by clicking a button or two.

One question that was raised in a Grails discussion group was on the value that Morph brings as a cloud computing platform. To help clear this up you need to think of cloud computing in three different layers. - infrastructure, infrastructure management & platform as a service.

At the infrastructure level you have the basis for cloud computing. This is where you'll find virtual servers or services like Amazon.com EC2. These services provide you with the ability to acquire a virtual server image that can be used on demand. In the case of Amazon EC2 there are also images available for you to use to make it faster to load the operating system and software stacks, but you the developer are responsible for making it all work together. EC2 is a great choice if you are looking to replace existing servers or build you own environment from the ground up. (We use Amazon EC2 as our compute platform)

A level above the infrastructure layer you find companies that provide tools to help developers deal with managing their own systems running on top of the infrastructure layer. These tools make it easier to launch new virtual servers and automate the installation of software components. They can provide their own version of auto-scaling bringing a new server online and installing the software automatically and running scripts to re-configure things. The drawback here is that the developer is still responsible for setting everything up and knowing how to perform the configurations and write scripts to automate them.

The third layer is Platform as a Service and is where Morph plays. This layer takes away the concept of servers and provides an application centric environment. It allows developers to just deploy their application and watch it run. No time is spent architecting the environment for high availability, dealing with load balancing, setting up backups or monitoring 7x24. All of those services are already embedded into the Platform as a Service, or in our case a Morph AppSpace. Morph also has system administrators who continually manage the environment. They patch operating systems, upgrade software and deal with alert conditions or faults that may occur. The goal of the Morphsters is to keep the underlying systems up and running 99.9% of the time. We back this goal up with our written SLA you can find on our web site.

Hopefully that answers the question posted. I look forward to more success with the Grails community and becoming the defacto standard for Platform as a Service.

Published Aug. 21, 2008— Reads 6,126
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media. All Rights Reserved.

▪ What is Cloud Computing?

▪ The Three Levels of Cloud Computing

▪ Cloud Computing: The Business of Building Clouds

▪ Cloud Computing: It's the Future of Enterprise IT

▪ Cloud Computing: Do You Really Want Your Data in the Cloud?

▪ Cloud Computing: I Want To Have My Cake and Eat It Too

▪ Cloud Computing vs Grid Computing

▪ Citrix CEO "The Industry Needs Time to Make Cloud Computing Consumable"

▪ Cloud Computing - Morgan Stanley is Banking on the Cloud

▪ Cloud Computing: The SmugMug Approach to Using Amazon's EC2 and S3

▪ Cloud Computing and the "Cloud Dining" Analogy

▪ Do Not Buy Your BlackBerry From AT&T

▪ Cloud Computing - The User-Friendly Version of Grid Computing

About David Abramowski
David Abramowski is CEO of MorphLabs. Prior to joining Morph Labs, Abramowski was Director of Product Marketing for Symantec, where he was responsible for introducing and enabling acquired endpoint technologies to Symantec's worldwide sales and partner organizations. In addition, he has extensive international experience enabling sales and technical teams, most recently with an assignment in Singapore, where he was involved with enterprise sales organizations across Japan, India, China, South Asia and Australia.

LATEST SAAS DEVELOPER STORIES

Google Is Ten: The Search Engine That Changed the World

By Jeremy Geelan

Google opened its doors in September 1998. But, as the Google official site phrases it, "The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake." Maybe, now that Chrome is released, instead of waiting till the...

The Cloud Crowd in 2008: Top Cloud Computing Providers

By Jeremy Geelan

Anyone allowing their search engine of choice to filter through the googols of bytes of data on the Web relating to "cloud computing" has during 2008 been rewarded with an exponentially increasing number of hits. But who are the companies currently most involved and what are thei...

Cloud Computing and Open Source

By Vinayak Hegde

The web moved from static HTML pages to Web 2.0. Software is increasing moving away from the delivery to the “hosted” model. Computing resource acquisitions is moving from buying to renting. This has given rise to new paradigms of delivering software such as Software-as-a-Ser...

Cloud Computing: A Software Delivery Paradigm, Not a Management Model

By Reuven Cohen

What Apple has done with its App Store is show the world that the key to monetizing the cloud is in the delivery of the key applications and assets (music, video, ringtones) through a simple and accessible channel. In the last few weeks Microsoft, Google and T-mobile have all ann...

Opinion: Automation's Great - But I Trust Humans More

By Brendan Cooper

We need services like Feedburner and Yahoo Pipes to provide the service they say they will. I know they’re not bound by the kind of service level agreements that would be in place if we were actually paying them, but they surely have to operate within the bounds of, well, opera...