No Fuss, No Muss: Developing Scalable Applications for the Cloud
Ted Leung, a Principal Engineer at Sun, and Ashwin Rao, a Sun Product Line Manager for developer tools, led this low-key session. As Leung put it, the attraction of the Cloud to developers is the promise of "no fuss, no muss" and easy expansion and contraction, as requirements change.
Why the Cloud?
Leung went through the reasons behind the rise of Cloud services. All Cloud offerings are "Something as a Service" (SaaS), for example, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), or platform, stack, and software. Leung then went through each service in detail, summarizing each service's Cloud offerings:
- Infrastructure as a Service - virtualized hardware, storage services, compute services
- Stack as a Service - Virtual Machine images (stripped-down Linux all the way to infrastructure support software)
- Platform as a Service - AppEngine, for example, or Heroku, or Zembly (which addresses the problem domain of social networking)
- Software as a Service - SalesForce.com is the prime example
Problems of the Cloud
The obvious one is latency to the storage, for example, or within the cloud for calculated services. These require that development and deployment become more deeply entwined.
Other problems include security (constrained by vendor so needs more thought), audit/regulatory issues, and the risk of essentially being with a single-source provider.
Leung then dealt with problems per area (for example, in IaaS, one must handle app-level scaling).
Finally, Leung noted that developers need to look at messaging around what's used to connect to services (for example, controlling priorities) and improving availability.
Today's Tool Landscape
Ashwin Rao then went over the developer tools available today. He noted that we can look at developing with the cloud, for the cloud, and in the cloud.
For developing with the cloud, Rao said good examples include the Amazon Web Services Toolkit with Eclipse (which extends the Web Tools platform, to deploy, run debug against), G-Eclipse, and Project Speedway.
For developing for the cloud, Rao's examples included Google App Engineerng SDK, Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio, and the Force.com IDE (part of SalesForce.com).
For developing in the cloud, Rao called this development as a service. Examples are Force.com Builder, Bungee Connect, Project Speedway, and Zembly.
Sun's Cloud Tools
Rao summarized Sun's "Connected Developer" tool complements as Kenai.com, Zembly.com, Project Speedway, and O'Malley. The NetBeans IDE is tightly integrated with the tools.
- Kenai - Cloud-centric software project management tool, provides a core set of app-building services
- Zembly - Cloud-based tools for social networking apps (Development as a Service)
- O'Malley - a catalog of discoverable applications
- Speedway - universal access to OpenSolaris on SPARC-processor-based Sun systems
Demo Time
Unfortunately, Internet latency made this part of the presentation difficult. Leung and Rao were unable to demonstrate Kenai even on a web browser interface because of poor Internet connection. (And the Netbeans IDE plugin was not yet ready.) The Zembly demo used the Google Translation service -- again, working within the NetBeans IDE. Finally, the duo showed a preview of Hudson, Sun's compiler for the cloud's continuous integration environment.
View the presentation slides for full details of the talk.