Overview of Java development on the Cloud

HomeCloud / Java / ToolsOverview of Java development on the Cloud
Apr 04 2011
by Sylvain FRANCOIS
9 Comments

The buzz around the cloud is not new, the buzz around the development on Cloud a little more. At Kalistick, we are especially interested in this subject for two reasons. First the purpose of our solution is to improve the delivery process, from development to deployment through the tests, which also reaches the goal of development on Cloud.

The other reason is related to our own infrastructure. Kalistick platform was designed from the beginning (2007) to operate in SaaS (Software as a Service) and we brought this platform on Cloud in 2010 with two objectives: better handle the load of our code analyses, and improve our own process of delivery by enjoy the flexibility of Cloud (we will give a feedback soon on this subject).

We are therefore actively monitoring activity about development on Cloud, and given the runaway of announces about this subject last weeks, it seems interesting to offer a synthesis of existing solutions and to go beyond twittospheric buzz to show concretely what these solutions provide.

This first post aims to clarify and introduce the key concepts of development on Cloud in order to give a comprehensive view of the market with a focus on solutions announced last weeks in the Java ecosystem: Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, CloudBees , eXo Cloud IDE … The next posts will focus on some of these solutions or certain types of uses.

Preamble

Before presenting usages and solutions, a few words to clarify the context.

All is not Cloud

The “cloud” term is now valuable in terms of marketing. Since some months, it seems like everything server-side is the Cloud, for example an “online” service (or SaaS) is necessarily on the Cloud. Or when Microsoft advertises on (French) national media, it is about “Cloud-Power”.

Not sure there is a precise definition accepted by everyone, the concept is quite broad. We consider here the Cloud as an infrastructure with the following characteristics:

  • Elasticity (scaling), i.e. the ability to change the infrastructure by adding / removing hardware resources easily as needed
  • Abstraction of infrastructure: the location and specifications of hardware or software (virtualization, sharing …) are transparent to the user
  • On-demand usage. Elasticity allows Cloud infrastructures to be used as needed, with on-demand costs

An application does not become magically Cloud

An application installed on a Cloud does not benefit automatically from Cloud advantages. In the same way that an application must follow some practices to be clustered. Hosting on the Cloud generally requires a different way to develop: ubiquity of data, failover, scalability, capacity …

dev@cloud and run@cloud

“dev@cloud” and “run@cloud” are terms from the CloudBees vocabulary, which separates its offer in two: DEV@cloud for services targeting developers (SCM, continuous integration …), RUN@cloud for application runtime. We also use these words to better separate these two types of usage. Here is how we are positioning these concepts:

dev@cloud & run@cloud

We define dev@cloud as a set of services hosted on the Cloud and facilitating the development process: code edition (IDE), continuous integration, quality assurance (where is positioned Kalistick), bug tracker … We also include a portion of run@cloud in dev@cloud to take in account tests and deployment of the application in its test environment(s). We will see there are solutions able to automatically deploy a delivery generated by the continuous integration into a runtime environment on the Cloud.

The whole chain from development to delivery can be achieved without any internal server, enjoying the benefits of Cloud: dynamic provisioning of resources, on-demand payment, ubiquity, multiple environments…

We will now browse the stack of services we put in dev@cloud and will position some solutions on the market. These are increasingly numerous. Most of vendors with an offer targeting the development cycle redirect their strategy towards the Cloud, sometimes just by rebranding their products with “Cloud” terms.

NB: the panorama of solutions is not meant to be exhaustive, it is particularly centered on the Java development, and restricted to products providing an evaluation and targeting developers.

Other posts that you should read:

  • Sam K.

    Very exhaustive view of the current offering in the cloud computing for Java development. In my the platform that has the best offer for the moment is Cloudbees. It’s a platform that in my view has a great future. And the competition pales in comparison. Because you’re either limited in what you can do (VmWare Code2Cloud, Google App Engine, ..) or their Paas offering is nothing more than Iaas+Middleware (Amazon beanstalk). Now I still wait for stuff like Dotcloud to be fully featured in Java to see how it goes. But I’ve been using cloudbees (Dev and run) and it’s smooth. You can use mvn to run , deploy your apps, configure jenkins for CI, and all that run smoothly. So go Cloudbees!

  • http://www.kalistick.com Sylvain FRANCOIS

    I don’t agree with “the competition pales in comparison [of CloudBees]“.

    Some platforms have a smaller scope, but this is not necessarily a lack of features. For instance, when you say you are limited with GAE, you are also limited with CloudBees: no SSH access to server (to monitor logs, change configuration files …), restricted toolbox (Ant/Maven for DEV@cloud, MySQL/Tomcat for RUN@cloud) … Because of that, we would not be able to migrate our (Kalistick) platform to CloudBees for now, and I suppose a lot of real applications would not too.

    With AWS Elastic Beanstalk, you are able to do what you want for RUN@cloud, but you will have to do yourself. This is a different vision. And you don’t have much features in the dev@cloud area.

    I think there is always a trade-off between simplicity/features provided by a service and the flexibility it offers. It’s up to you to set the cursor.

    But I agree CloudBees has a great future :)

  • Pingback: Mix-IT, can't wait for the next one!

  • Sam K.

    Finalement l’offre de Vmware est là, avec CloudFoundry. Et c’est vraiment énorme. ça promet une belle bataille avec les solutions IAAS oriented comme Beanstalk, mais aussi avec GAE (largement en avance pour l’instance, on verra pour quand encore …) et Cloudbees. En tout cas pour les developpeurs tout ceci s’annonce plutôt bien.

  • http://www.kalistick.com Sylvain FRANCOIS

    En même temps, CloudFoundry existe déjà depuis longtemps, même si cette nouvelle version est une refonte.

    On ne l’a pas évoqué car on pensait qu’il serait intégré/eclipsé par Code2Cloud, car l’offre semblait un peu péricliter. Du coup, on attend de voir comment seront positionnés ces 2 produits.

  • http://www.lavawampv2.org daigoume

    What a great resource!

  • Manu

    Bonjour,

    Les slides de la présentation Mix-IT du 5 avril 2011 ne semblent plus accessible …

  • Manu

    Trouvé ici : http://www.slideshare.net/kalistick/kalistick-mixit-devcloud

    • http://www.kalistick.com Sylvain FRANCOIS

      Merci, j’ai corrigé le lien.

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