Getting ready for the cloud
Posted 9 January 2009 @ 6:47 pm by Nati Shalom
In the past few months, I have been speaking in various conferences about cloud computing.
In my presentations, I tried to focus primarily on how one can take practical steps to benefit from the cloud today. To illustrate my points, I used GigaSpaces as the scale-out application server and Amazon EC2 as the cloud infrastructure and thus demonstrated how one can deploy EXISTING java applications on the cloud while:
- Not having to re-write your application
- Preventing lock-in to specific cloud provider
- Enabling seamless portability between your local environment to cloud environment
- No code or configuration change is required between the two environments
- Develop local - test on the cloud
- Built for iterative development
In addition, I demonstrated the use of our new Cloud tools framework which enabled me to fully automate the entire application provisioning process on the cloud. This tool enabled me to:
- Deploy load balancer
- Cluster web containers
- Cluster application processing units
- MySQL database connected to EBS
And all that through a single click deployment.
In the demonstration, I also showed how you can benefit from the cloud:
- Dynamically scale when the load breaches a certain threshold
- New web containers are dynamically linked to the load-balancer (no configuration change is required as all is taken care of on the fly).
- Self healing - if something breaks, scale-down to existing machine while getting a new machine ready.
The entire presentation can be viewed online
You can also view the online video presentation that i gave in the Cloud Summit in Tel Aviv where i ran a live demo of our new cloud infrastructure on EC2 demonstrating both dynamic scaling and also what happens when machine fails in front of a live audience!
The video recording of this presentation is available here
If you want to try to run the demo yourself and you don't have an Amazon user - just drop an email to cloud at gigaspaces dot com and will send you a free pass to the early access program.
Enjoy!
