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Harpreet has been driving the creation of a Several New WhitePapers for the Sun GlassFish Portfolio. Topics covered include: Hudson, JBoss, WebSpace Server Cloud and many more. A full list is available from the GF Portfolio Resources page. Also see the Sun.Com Resources page for whitepapers and more across all of Sun's products. All whitepapers are free but registration is required. |
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Joyent and Sun have announced a highly tuned MySQL Accelerator that claims 2x-4x better performance than EC2 (but see comments). Joyent focuses on "Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing", with offerings on Public Cloud and the Private Cloud, plus a new Smart Platform in beta (tutorial). Joyent's Cloud is Based on OpenSolaris and they are the largest OpenSolaris installation in the world. |
Joyent and Sun have a long collaboration on Software and Hardware ([1], [2], [3]). One of the containers supported in Joyent's Accelerators is GlassFish; see [4], [5], [6], and the MySQL Appliance, plus the Zeus Accelerator (built using ZXTM's Extensible Traffic Manager) and GlassFish make a very good Java Stack. We had covered Joyent's hosting in earlier posts (@TA, @MtR).
BTW, while checking on this piece, I see that Joyent has Sold Strongspace and BingoDisk to ExpandDrive so they can "... focus on Joyent Accelerators and Joyent Smart".
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Recently, we have started receiving inquiries about hosting options for SailFin. A few months back SailFin team had setup a demo server in a Go Daddy server. It has worked out quite well so far. Now, Sreeram has written a blog about running SailFin (V2 b20) with Amazon EC2. He gives details such as enabling SIP UDP port, MySQL configuration and using DynDNS to setup the domain name. Try it out! |
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Kohsuke has been releasing additional Hudson features in preparation for his JavaOne Presentations. The latest additions are a new EC2 Plugin, support for Selenium Grid and the ability to easily enlist a Swarm of Computers to leverage sub-utilized desktops. The swarm approach seems a good way to leverage the isolation provided by VirtualBox (see last week's Webinar) to convince your co-workers to donate spare cycles. |
We have 3 webinars this week - one in our normal time slot, the other two in new slots to squeeze the topics before JavaOne. The topics are very interesting, I hope you can join us.
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The first webinar is on The presentation is on Tuesday, May 19th, 10am US Pacific, at TheAquarium Channel. Full details (and recordings) at the Show Page. |
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POSTPONED - This webinar has been postponed until after JavaOne. The second webinar is in our normal slot when Chris Kampemeier will present on Software Appliances. Chris, Rudolf, Gabor and others have been working on this some GlassFish-based appliances on a Solaris JeOS and will be discussing the topic, but the exact abstract is still TBD.
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The third webinar will be by Andy Hall on VirtualBox, the popular type-2 virtualization solution. The presentation is on Friday, May 22th, 9am US Pacific, at TheAquarium Channel. Full details (and recordings) at the Show Page. |
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Yesterday a portion of Google's network's infrastructure had a Two Hour Failure which impacted an unknown (but sizeable) number of users - see PCWord, InformationWeek, WashingtonPost, Forbes, plus #googlefail@Twitter. |
This seems a good reminder of the benefits of a private cloud for mission-critial operations in enterprises... and of the benefits of standards in reducing the cost of exit.
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Many years ago, one would write a program by punching a Card Deck on your Puncher, submitting it (with a rubber band) and then getting back a printout... Then we went through Teletypes, CRTs, Workstations and today's Laptops. So, how does the future look like? I like a hybrid solution where we use our "local" computation device(s) and also services "on the cloud" that expand, complement, or just interact with one or more local devices and/or agents. Kenai is already providing some of those services; Kohsuke just posted a note pointing to a service that does Automatic Continuous Integration for Grails projects on Google Code. |
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NetBeans 6.7 Beta is Now Available. I'll highlight two of the Many Features: Kenai Integration and Hudson Integration. The first one continues to flesh out the story of the Connected Developer; the second is yet another example of Hudson Adoption. Check out the Home Page, the Release Notes or go and just Download it! |
The connected developer story is beginning to look pretty good; I'll come back to it after I find time to write a few background posts needed to provide context for the story.
Added - Also see JAG's post on the topic.
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Mon-Thu I'll be attending the MySQL User's Conference here in Santa Clara. The tone of the conference is noticeably different to that of its (even larger) sibling JavaOne in San Francisco, and the topics are very grounded in the practical needs of the Users of the technology. There are many very interesting talks, below is a small selection extracted from my Personal Schedule. Starting with those related to topics we normally cover here: Several BOFs: OpenSSO, OpenDS and LDAP, JavaFX Clients, OpenSolaris and Web Stack. Several Technical Sessions: MySQL and ZFS, Twitter and NetBeans and GlassFish and MySQL (that's Arun). |
The rest of this list is not comprehensive but, here it is...
• Keynotes:
State of the Dolphin,
Google,
KickFire,
Cloud,
Andi,
SmugMug,
Infobrite and JasperSoft,
Obama.
• Fun Events
Quizz Show.
• Tutorials:
Scale out,
MapReduce,
Partitioning,
Memcached
• DTrace:
Intro,
MySQL and Dtrace,
Another DTrace
• Cloud:
MySQL and EC2,
Hadoop and MySQL,
Cloud Backup for MySQL,
MySQL Clusters in the Cloud,
MapReduce
• Drizzle:
Rethinking MySQL,
Memory,
libdrizzle,
Drizzle BOF,
Clusters
• Memcached:
Beginners,
Distributed and InnoDB,
And Flash!,
Libraries,
Advanced Use
• Engines:
InnoDB,
Falcon,
Maria,
PBXT.
• General:
Performance and Scalability,
the Future,
Code Contributions
(Masood's),
Craig's List,
Sandbox,
Death.
... and I reserve the right to add and/or remove entries from my schedule at any time :-)
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Google AppEngine has added Java support (announcement). The list of JVM-based languages includes JRuby, Groovy, Jython and Scala. A list of the supported standards is here; the intention seems to be to provide a "web tier" set of specs for Java and JVM-based languages but the details are not very clear (to me), for example, it claims Servlet 2.4 (not 2.5), some version of JPA, partial JSP support. Hopefully the list will evolve into one of the modern standard at some point; perhaps the Web Profile in Java EE 6? |
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Today, at CommunityOne East, Sun unveiled more details of its Cloud initiative: A world of many clouds, both public and private, that are open and compatible. The initiative enables the definition and deployment of Virtual Data Centers, leveraging q-Layer, xVM and VirtualBox and components like OpenSolaris, MySQL, GlassFish and Web Stack. For more details, check Cloud@Sun, the Launch Event and this Overview. I also enjoyed reading/watching about the SuperNat center and TheRegister ran an Overview White Paper. |
Also check the personal perspectives from
Craig
and
Tim,
who were directly involved in defining the RESTful API for manipulating
the cloud.
The APIS are
under Creative Commons license
(see Opening APIs)
and are available at
Kenai
,
see
API home
and
Hello Cloud
project.
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Today, at CommunityOne East, Sun will announce more of its Cloud Initiative so it is appropriate to highlight Kohsuke's recent announcement on Hadoop, the Java-based Apache project that provides a framework for distributed data-intensive computation (Website, Wikipedia, NYTimes article). |
In a nutshell, Kohsuke has added a new Hudson Plugin that can turn a Hudson cluster into a Hadoop cluster. Hudson is very easy to install and provisioning and Kohsuke is considering several extensions already, so this seems an interesting direction. Details at KK's writeup.
Doug (Division VP) and Lew (CTO) have started fleshing out Sun's Cloud story.
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Lew has given several interviews; check @Overcast (podcast available) and @IW. From the latter: We see a future where there are a bunch of clouds, both public and private clouds, and companies will be able to build scalable apps that are self-provisioning. From Dave, you can check out his Chalk Talk and listen to his BlogTalk Radio. The Cloud terminology seems to be settling into SAAS, PAAS and IAAS; see [1], [2], [3] and [4]. I expect continued diversity in the technologies used but Sun's software portfolio - including Q-layer - seems well suited to several markets, including private enterprise clouds. |
Thanks to Vijay for the initial tips on the terminology posts.
Here are some recent news that will have an impact on many of our GlassFish users:
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From Ruby-land, news that Merb will merge into Rails 3. This seems a case where combining the two efforts should improve the result. We are also noticing a significant increase in the mindshare around JRuby in all these projects as the quality of JRuby continues to increase. Added - also see the Story at SDTimes. Crossbow is the Solaris' Network Virtualization architecture and has just been released into OpenSolaris. Crossbow provides "virtualized lanes" that will scale at high performance over many cores; see Sunnay's Introduction and Ben's two posts: Announcement and Experiments. Crossbow is useful for Network Resource Allocation and will have deep implications for our Virtualization offerings - see Michaels' note from 2008 on the topic. From the cloud computing area, Sun acquires Q-Layer; see the Press Release. Vijay has two relevant posts: an Introduction with several good links and a Terminology Overview; Om (@GigaOm) also writes about the Acquisition. Q-Layer should be a great addition to the xVM family. We planned it a while ago, announced it in July, and it finally happened! The core of the Sun Web Server (used in places like MLB.com and Sun's own BSC and Sun Forums) is now Open Source - see the announcements from CVR and Jyri. The ancestry of the code goes back to the Netscape Server but it has changed quite a bit; see Jyri's details. Sun Web Server 7.0 U4 is included in OpenSolaris but it is also available separately as part of the Sun Web Stack 1.4 and contains many features that complement the GlassFish Server. Finally, from Solaris-land, a note that Sun is now doing Stricter Enforcement of the existing Patch Policy. No changes or impact on the situation for Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server patches - see our Sun's GF Enterprise Support. |
