Resin fulfills the vision of Cloud computing in a Java EE environment
What makes a good cloud offering for a Java EE server? What do developers and architects expect from a Java EE vendor to be cloud ready?
I suspect they expect the following:
- Cloud ready
- Elastic ready
- Ability to manage the nodes in the cloud
- Ability to manage versions in the cloud
Cloud ready
The advantage we get from deploying applications to the cloud is the ability to scale up processing nodes (Java EE servers) rapidly if needed. And the ability to re-purpose processing nodes (spin down, re-purpose and spin back up) when needed as well. This can be in a public cloud setting like Amazon EC2 or in a private cloud (VMWare vCloud) or some combination thereof.
Elastic ready
To be elastic, is to be flexible. The ability to bring up a new node without any configuration.
Ability to manage nodes in the cloud
Once you have nodes deployed in the cloud, how do you manage them? How do you check the health of so many nodes? How do you keep your eye on them all?
Ability to manage versions in the cloud
A common problem with cloud computing and Java EE servers is application archive versioning, war files, and ear files. How do you version a new war file? More importantly, how do you deploy one war file to the entire cloud? Can you deploy a version in a graceful manner without bringing down the entire cloud of nodes?
Resin Java EE 6 application server
Caucho’s Resin server is an elastic cloud ready, Java EE 6 Web Profile server. It has the ability to bring up new instances in an elastic cloud environment. The triad is the brain of the pod. A pod is a collection of nodes that serves some common set of applications. New instances, called dynamic servers, join the pod, talk to the triad and get the current versions of the applications to run. Then they start running the applications.
Cloud aware, load aware, intelligent load balancer
The pod load balancer is smart enough to allow the new dynamic server some time to warm up and install its applications from the triad before it starts sending it requests. The pod load balancer can truly balance the load based on the true load on each node, not just random round robin load balancing. The load balancer can also act as an http proxy cache to increase throughput by caching images, css files and other web resources.
Cloud failover that is cloud deployment version aware
Membership has its privileges, once up, the new dynamic server joins the pod services. It gets reliable, failover sessions. It gets reliable, failover caching. It gets reliable, failover messaging. Everything you would expect from a cloud computing platform like Caucho Resin server.
Now what if for some reason a node in the pod goes down. And then let’s say you deploy new versions of the applications. Then later, we bring that node back up. Does it start serving an old version of the application? No. Of course not. It talks to the triad and gets the current version of the applications.
Our deployment mechanism is truly cloud aware. It versions the deployments. You can even rollback an entire pod to a previous version. You can also gradually deploy a new version of the application. New sessions in the pod will use the new version of the application while existing sessions will use the older version of the application. Eventually all of the older session timeout and only sessions using the new application are active.
Manageable cloud
Also with Resin you can manage entire pods from load balancer to http proxy cache to triad to individual dynamic servers with a single admin tool. This admin tools allows you to profile, analyze GC, Heap, PermGen, OS memory, monitor threads, inspect memory usage at the class level, and other Java VM graphs and OS graphs from one console for every node in the pod. The support the admin tool provides rivals that of some dedicated profiling tools but does it for your entire pod. Now you can really see what is going on in the cloud.
Health Watches to auto-manage your cloud
You can also setup up health watches so you know when some critical situation has been released and then take some action to monitor, diagnose and control your cloud.
Resin is a Java EE, cloud computing ready server
Resin goes beyond just being a processing node in an elastic cloud. It is truly an intelligent elastic cloud coordinator bringing the promise of cloud computing into the hands of Java EE developers.