JohnBs personal blog

With all the buzz surrounding ‘cloud’ computing and most people not really having any clue what ‘cloud’ really means Aptana seem to have slipped a product out under the dark of night that really does deserve a look and really does offer ‘cloud’ computing.

The trend of moving from expensive, under utilised dedicated servers to highly utilised virtualised servers is now moving further towards even more granularity of hosting of individual applications on highly expandable, highly available systems like Aptana Cloud and Windows Azure.

Let’s roll back a few weeks to when Microsoft unveiled Windows Azure, their entry into the cloud, providing .NET services and SQL services for .NET applications. What they demoed at PDC looked great, hosting at the application layer – even if the application does have to written specifically for running on Windows Azure – I don’t have full access (Despite a Microsoft partner) so I’m only writing about what I’ve read. It’s tightly integrated into Visual Studio as you’d expect so you deploy right from within VS. No pricing is available for Windows Azure hosting as of yet but it’s expected to be ‘competitive’ and priced similarly to it’s competitors i.e.. by the hour. Azure applications have to written as such and therefore aren’t all that ‘portable’ as Microsoft have stated that Azure will only available as a hosted service.

I’ve previously looked at Amazon EC2 and found the *Nix options to be too complicated to get up and running and have had more success with the new Windows instances but you still need to be tech savvy to get something up and running and certainly know about server administration and the wealth of TLA’s Amazon uses to get off the ground. In my opinion, to the lay developer who just wants to get an app out there Amazon EC2 is just too complicated at the moment.

So now we come to last week when I discovered Aptana Cloud and to say I’m impressed is an understatement, I just wish I could justify the additional cost (over my current dedicated server) after my trial has expired in a few days when I have to move my blog back.

As I discovered previously, my projects listed in Aptana had a ‘Deploy to cloud’ option which I clicked and my adventure began.

Without any code changes, I right clicked the project containing my blogs WordPress installation and choose to deploy it to the cloud. After a brief sign up for a 21 day trial (no credit card required) and selection of my required service I was good to go and was presented with a synchronise view to send my project up to their servers and a few minutes later my code was all in the ‘cloud’. At this point I was taken to the ‘My Cloud’ tab within ‘My Aptana’ and my eyes opened. (I’m a sucker for gauges and dials!)

Next job, getting the database sorted. Fortunately, the guys at Aptana have this all covered for you, providing the choice of phpMyAdmin, Web Admin, DB Explorer (a view inside Aptana) or even direct access via desktop DB admin tools. I choose to use mySQL Administrator I have installed locally so I whipped off a backup of my current DB and then connected to the mySQL instance provided by Aptana Cloud. The restore took a few seconds – right within the dashboard is a ‘Show Access information’ section that gives you all the details you need for connecting to the various services, including the user accounts to set up your application to use – what, we don’t have to use the ‘root’ account??? So then a quick edit of the wp-config.php file to update the datasource information –(remotely I might add via the ‘Explore Public Site’ option) and I was done. Hitting the site via the johnbeynonorguk.aptanacloud.com DNS entry I was presented with my site – far, far, far too simple!

Each ‘site’ deployed get’s it own IP address so a quick dip in to my DNS control panel my domain was pointed at my newly deployed site. Finished. Time to explore…

The feature list of Aptana Cloud is certainly impressive;

• Packages start from $0.04 an hour for a 256Mb ram, 5Gb instance up to $0.37 for 2Gb ram, 25Gb all configured from a ‘slider’ in your settings tab. What’s even cooler is they show you how much it’s going to cost for the month so you don’t have to work it out yourself! Even the cheapest Amazon EC2 instance will cost you $72 (and that doesn’t include permanent storage, transfers etc) a month compared to $28.80 for Aptana Cloud
• Instances are burstable up to 95% of the 8 CPUs per server.
• You get 10TB (TERRABYTES!!!) of transfer a month – so no charges for get requests, putting data up there etc.
• Included in the price you get;
• Subversion repository
• staging/private servers
• SFTP access
• SSH access
• mySQL
• Standard Support (1 hour response to site unavailability in business hours) – but only $29.95 a month for 24/7
• Web and Resource stats
• Multi User Unlimited team option (SFTP, SVN, MySQL, SSH, Sync etc) for $2.95 a month.

It’s the little things that matter. The other morning I checked my email and had a JIRA ticket for a site outage picked up by their monitoring system – it later turned out to be a false alarm – but nevertheless they’d been in, restarted the ‘pulse’ service and updated the ticket in the space of a few minutes.

When I wanted to add a plugin to my WordPress installation I added the plugin to my local project, went into the ‘My Cloud’ tab and synchronized the changes to the ‘cloud’ – it presented the differences and could choose to skip various files and I was done – only then to receive an automated email telling me that I had performed a sync and listed the files/actions that had been updated. This would be damn handy in a multi user environment! This information is also available through the dashboard in Aptana.

Since I’m already paying for a dedicated server I’m not sure if I’m going to leave my blog running in the ‘cloud’ as I can’t justify the additional cost when I have a server already sitting out there – especially when my blog hardly puts any demand on a server. Plus, I have a handful of other sites (including ColdFusion) and since Aptana Cloud is ‘per application’ could end up paying the same as I do for a dedicated server very quickly.

Aptana already have listed Python and RoR as platforms they expect to support pretty soon – with ColdFusion as an option in their survey of what people want to see supported, imagine that – deploy a CF app in a few clicks!

In conclusion, if you’re looking to host a PHP application with minimum fuss and the option of scaling up/down then Aptana Cloud is a great choice and certainly by far the easiest way I’ve ever seen to getting an app up and running in the cloud.