Amazon recently announced an addition to their service portfolio  - Elastic Beanstalk. This service is as if it is magically simple to deploy application to the cloud. This simplicity is revolutionary approach from Amazon toward cloud deployment and configuration management.

You can read more about this here - http://itsitspace.blogspot.com/2011/01/elastic-beanstalk-amazons-revolutionary.html

Change Line of Code -> Click Run ->Test

vs.

Change Line of Code -> Run Build -> Wait... -> Open Browser -> Deploy with Beanstalk -> Wait... -> Test

Are you kidding me? Btw, the first line works exactly with GridGain - nothing to build, nothing to deploy.

Nikita Ivanov.

GridGain Systems.

Nikita, I thought this might catch your eye.

My first instinct after reading this was to dowload some GridGain software and do a test myself. I think a comparison of ease of deployment of a war file to the cloud is in order.

Besides Amazon and GridGain, which other vendors should have their hat in that ring? I was thinking about trying to deploy the LifeRay portal war file to each environment and see just how easy it was.

I just want to clarify that as far as I see Beanstalk is way better than a limited GAE platform and retains all controls with developers. The mentioned "ease" of deployment is already available with the current crop of Web-based or IDE-based "build-wait-click-wait-restart-wait-test..." vendors and I don't think this was the only focus of this release. But at least for now, Amazon has the same technology as GAE - but done in a much better way, IMHO.

Nikita Ivanov.

GridGain Systems.

The big difference here is that control remains with the developer to a large extent which can't be said of Google GAE and VMware/vmForce/OpenPaas/SpringRailOnMeCloud were you have absolutely no way of setting JVM arguments such as adding application performance management capabilities (i.e. -javaaagents).

I was able to install OpenCore's metering engine (including its dynamic load time instrumentation agent) yesterday on an AMI and then use this image and reference the jars in the Beanstalk environment conf and Tomcat server startup arguments - I have not being able to do with any other PaaS solution to-date.

Is this possible with GridGain?

Beanstalk pretty much kills off those with hollow "Open" PaaS claims were its complete lock down and confinement to a cell.

"Beanstalk is way better than a limited GAE platform and retains all controls with developers."

These restrictions exist for a reason - a programming model that "scales" for unpredictable/explosive growth:

http://manidoraisamy.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-app-engine-unheard-voice-of.html

 

The open-source SteamCannon project is more advanced in many areas, check out comparison here:

http://steamcannon.org/news/2011/01/19/steamcannon-vs-elastic-beanstalk/