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.

Until Thursday of last week I’ve never had any success getting a *Nix based system up and running on Amazon EC2 – but since the release of Windows based machines I’ve been much more successful.

Just in case you’ve not played with it yet, it’s super simple and what’s better is you don’t even have to touch a command line once – us Windows folk like that :). It can all be managed by ElasticFox a neat management plug-in for Firefox.

Once you’re in ElasticFox you see a list of public AMIs (Amazon Machine Images). These are basically starter machines to get you up and running. There are a heap of Windows (DataCenter edition) machines, both 32 and 64 bit, anonymous and authenticated system, with/without SQL Server standard and also a machine with SQL Server Express, IIS, ASP.NET.

I’m not going to cover the ins and outs of getting a machine up and running because there’s a doc here that covers it all.

When it comes to creating an instance of your chosen AMI you get to chose the instance type,

• m1, small
• m1, large
• m1, xlarge

These correspond to machines ranging from a single processor with 1.7Gb RAM upwards – m1, large was a dual processor with 7.8Gb RAM. I did find that if I try to boot a 64 Bit system using m1, small I received an error message

InvalidParameterValue: The requested instance type’s architecture (i386) does not match the….

..so be careful of that. Anyhow, once you’ve got an instance of a system booted you login via RDP and you’re good to go. Or are you?

All you’ve done this far is boot an instance of an existing machine – you’re free to install software (although there’s no i386 folder if you choose a plain machine without IIS so you can’t (easily) install it). I whipped up a machine running Apache, PHP, MySQL and then slapped on Wordpress (just because it’s quick to get up an running!). If I were to terminate this instance at this point I’d loose what I’ve setup so far *BUT* if were to reboot the machine, say following a Windows Update then my instance comes back up as I left it with the update applied.

To persist a machine (and to allow you to create multiple instances of it) you have to create your own private AMI from this new instance. It’s a relatively trivial process which bundles your AMI onto Amazon S3 for storage and then allows you to create instances of that AMI.

Then there’s another Amazon product, Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) which gives you a persistent storage volume that you can connect to your instances (also via ElasticFox). It mounts directly as a drive via some clever voodoo and you just treat it as such.

So what does all this mean for a CF developer? It’s pretty easy to get a CF server up and running – remember though that the c/d drives are not persisted unless you’ve bundled it into an AMI, so any further configurations etc would need to be bundled up for persistence – CF could be run from an EBS volume although I’d be more inclined to keep that in the AMI and use an EBS volume just for storage. Equally, databases would be best stored on the EBS volume.

When Amazon introduces load balancing between instances then things will get more interesting and if you’re using ColdFusion then the usual administrative tasks like keep settings synchronised across instances could be fun (unless you use CAR files??) along with licensing issues if you start running multiple instances and not necessarily if it’s running on the same underlying hardware.

If you’ve been keeping up to speed with Railo then one of it’s really neat features is the server synchronisation that is able to keep settings in sync across a cluster – something I think that Adobe seriously needs to consider adding as it would be a great help, not only for ‘cloud scenarios’ but for Enterprise level clients as a whole.

Now Amazon’s announcement and launch of Windows based EC2 comes only a few days before Microsoft is expected to announce it’s offering in the guise of Microsoft Strata and a project code named RedDog (Incidentally, Strata means ‘Loss’ in Polish’) on Monday (today) at it’s PDC keynote – all eyes will be on what Microsoft release and the direction that they’re taking into the cloud.

Last week Amazon announced that it will be offering Windows based EC2 instances as well as Microsoft SQL server instances later this fall (incidentally I had to look up when ‘fall’ is – apparently it starts 23 September). Their press release obviously talks about hosting ASP.NET applications but it will be interesting to see how other application platforms will behave – obviously now with a Windows license involved there’s going to be additional cost involved but Microsoft have a Windows license aimed squarely at Virtualisation (Microsoft Windows Datacenter edition) which like Adobe ColdFusion Enterprise permits unlimited virtual instances. Of further note will be how Amazon commission new Windows instances given it’s fussy-ness for unique identifiers for machines etc.

To find out more go to aws.amazon.com/windows