Perplexed looking for a guide

Project Caroline

I feel like a proud papa! Earlier this week my team had the opportunity to show off the research they've on the development and deployment of horizontally scaled Internet services. The most tangible result is the research platform Project Caroline. We have a Project Caroline grid running and connected to the Internet. We are allowing external research partners to use this "public evaluation" grid, as resources allow. (If you are internal to Sun, we have an internal grid on which we can give you access.)

We've posted an article on Project Caroline on the Sun Research site: "A Platform ... as a Service". During the Sun Labs Open House we also gave a presentation on Project Caroline that included a couple of demos. The video of the presentation should be available soon.

It's a really cool platform that allows you to programmatically control all of the infrastructure resources you might need in building a horizontally scaled system. You can allocate and configure databases, file systems, private networks (VLAN's), load balancers, and a lot more, all dynamically, which makes it easy to flex the resources your application uses up and down as required.

One of the things I like the best, since I never write perfect code, is the NetBeans plug-in that allows you to monitor the behavior of application running on the grid, from your laptop; and then debug, single step, etc. any of the processes or resources you have running on the grid. No more writing and testing applications on your laptop only to port them to grid environment, and spend more time debugging. Instead, with Project Caroline, you write you code in NetBeans and run it the first time directly on the grid and debug it there, just as if it were running on your laptop but in the real production environment!

If you want to take a closer look at Project Caroline go to the the Project Caroline Web site, where you can find documentation, samples applications, tools for using the grid, and discussion forums. All of our source code is licensed under GPLv2, and can be found on the web site.

Finally, remember this is part of a research project in the Sun Chief Technologist's Office where we exploring different approaches to utility computing. We are eager to see what in this approach works and what doesn't, where this approach fits and for what problems it doesn't. Let us know.

Technorati Tags: redshift, ProjectCaroline

Posted at 03:02PM Apr 11, 2008 by rezippel in Sun  |  Comments[3]