JBoss Cloud (and JBoss Aplpiance Support) are now mature enought to leave oddthesis incubator. We're moving to JBoss Community!

StormGrind

StormGrind is a umbrella for all cloud JBoss projects. Learn more about StormGrind – visit home page and documentation pages!

Read also our announcement on our new blog.

Project name changes

With the move we also renamed all our projects. Take a look at diagram below which describes name transition.

JBoss Cloud from now is called CirrAS.

JBoss Appliance Support is divided into two projects: BoxGrinder Build and Cantiere. BoxGrinder Build is a set of Rake tasks to build appliances, Cantiere is a set of Rake tasks to build in a convenient way RPM files.

You can read more about this transition on a special wiki page.

New versions

With the move we also released new versions for our projects: CirrAS, Cantiere and BoxGrinder Build!

You can read more on our new blog!

Technical informations

As I mentioned before we have now a new blog. There will be no new posts/announcements on oddthesis.org blog. Please update your news reader and bookmarks!

We moved to new source repositories; read more here.

We use now JIRA to track issues; read more here.

Currently we don't have any mailing list. Instead we're in process of creating forums on our new Clearspace installation at JBoss. More info here.

Our new Twitter account is right here and if you still have questions about the move, feel free to ask – we're in our new IRC room.

Hi - I am your host Michael - and am joining bob in the quest to fullfill the thesis mentioned to the right ... 

(ok waiting for your head to turn back)

Part of this is improving deltacloud.org, and as such I added a driver for the "rackspace cloud" (previously known as Mosso - well at least they didn't change it to love symbol - pretty sure there isn't a UTF-8 char for that, feel free to prove me wrong..). 

Get it here: http://github.com/michaelneale/driver-rackspace

I'm happy to announce next JBoss Cloud beta!

JOPR

JOPR is bundled in our appliances! As I mentioned in my earlier post, JOPR, a monitoring and managing platform from JBoss garage, is now included by default in JBoss Cloud. What does it mean? You get monitoring of your running instances for free with all shiny charts and historical data. Of course that's not everything. You can define alerts for resources you're monitoring!

I thought that we could monitor JBoss AS too, but JBoss AS 5.0 and 5.1 isn't supported yet... There is a JBoss AS plugin, but it will work with JBoss AS 5.2+. When it'll be released we'll upgrade immediately to deliver first-class JBoss monitoring.

Read more about using configuring JOPR in JBoss Cloud.

To see a full list of resources that can be managed by JOPR go to JOPR wiki, especially take a look at Managed Resources page.

CloudFront support

If you're new to Amazon CloudFront read more here. Beta7 images are released via CloudFront. CloudFront is a web service for files delivery. The main difference between uploading a release to a host via SSH and to CloudFront is that CloudFront files are replicated over the globe to many locations. This is transparent to client, only thing he'll notice is great download speed :)

For CloudFront support we need to change appliance definition file. Read about current structure here.

Read more about using CloudFront in JBoss Cloud.

Are we faster?

I think yes, we're are a bit. We removed several unnecessary services enabled on boot. You feel difference if you're using images in your local virtualization environment. Want an example? Front-end appliance boots 15 sec on my laptop using VMware Fusion.

On EC2 this takes much more time (about five minutes/instance), I explained why here.

Bug fixes

We fixed a few bugs.

Most annoying was #88. Versions pre 2.6.12 of GossipRouter were eating about 40% of CPU in idle. This wasn't great. Thanks to Bela who fixed this bug really quick for us!

After JGroups 2.6.12.GA was released we updated it immediately. Beta7 is the first version that upgrades JGroups version across front-end and back-end appliances. Homogeneity will counteract possibly errors caused by version mismatch.

Where it is?

New JBoss Cloud images are available for immediately download. Links to images are on our Releases page. There are also AMI id's you can copy.

We're always for you in #jboss-cloud and on our mailing list. Tickets are welcome too.

Have fun!

There are many things to do. I'll highlight three major tasks planned for 1.0.0.Beta7. Of course there are also a few bugs to fix.

1. Go fast!

We know, time is precious. We don't want to take your time and therefore we'll speed up our appliances! The goal is to start an instance under 5 minutes on EC2 and <20 sec on local virtualization platform. On EC2 this takes so much time, because every time you hit Launch button an image is copied from bucket to host and unbundled, we cannot speed up this process, unfortunately :(

We're optimizing boot process. That means: disabling everything we don't need and removing all unnecessary packages.

2. JOPR monitoring

JOPR is a JBoss monitoring and management tool (probably better word would be platform). We'll use it to monitor all services we have in the cloud, including: JBoss AS and httpd. System level services like sshd we'll monitor too!

You can define alerts, see resource usage history, customize your dashboard, etc. Just take a look! More screenshots are available on project website.

3. Amazon CloudFront support

Amazon CloudFront will enable faster image delivery. Every downloaded file is cached on servers around the world, this will dramatically increase your download speed (I hope!).

When it will be released?

The plan is to release Beta7 by the end of next week. Follow us on Twitter or take a seat in our IRC room to know everything from first hand!

There was really quiet on our blog for some time, I know. But, hey, there are several reasons for that! Most important is we’re finally moved to Fedora 11.

Fedora 11 is here!

This was a real big task. I though we can just switch repo locations and that’s it! No, it wasn’t so simple and smooth as I though. This has resulted finally in not supporting Fedora 10 anymore. Sad, but true. Supporting those two versions was really too difficult to maintain, mostly because of different RPM package formats and lack of libguestfs in Fedora 10.

Libguestfs

Have you heard about great library called libguestfs? It’s a great tool for accessing and modifying disk images. JBoss Cloud is a nice use case for this tool. From Beta6 everything we’re doing with RAW disks is done with libguestfs. This gives us more stable code, and we can now do more fancy stuff!

There was several issues with libguestfs, but libguestfs team has fixed them really quick, thanks!

Other (important) things

We’ve done initial code refactoring and review. This will improve our ability to modify/add new features to JBoss Cloud.

For those who are building own images: now we have great logging for our rake tasks. This has decreased the amount of messages printed to the screen. But if you want all messages, just turn on debug:

JBOSS_CLOUD_LOG_THRESHOLD=debug rake appliance:management-appliance:vmware:personal

We fixed also many, really many bugs.

Where I can get it?

As usual, Beta6 is available on our release page.

I need help!

Drop a message on our o mailing list, or ping us on  IRC, we're happy to help you!

If you found a bug, please let us know by filling a new ticket!

Last night I was invited to present about JBoss Cloud at the July meeting of TriJUG.  I'd say it went over well, and a lot of questions and conversations ensued following.

Here are the slides.

Bob McWhirter's presentation recorded on JavaOne 2009 is now available!

Don't forget to watch part two. Happy watching!

Want to hear more about JBoss Cloud directly from core developers? Want to know what's the future of JBoss Cloud? Take a seat in one of these locations:

• Silesia JUG meeting: 30.06.2009, 6:30 pm local time, Katowice, Poland, ul. Mikołowska 100, room 136.
• The Triangle Users Group TriJUG meeting on July 20.
• JBoss World, Chicago, 03.09.2009, 10:50 am local time, Hilton Chicago

What’s JBoss Cloud?

JBoss Cloud is a set of images to run your applications in a JBoss AS 5 cluster in a cloud. It’s virtualization platform independent; you can run it on your favorite platform: Xen, KVM, VMware and of course on Amazon EC! We’re providing a full set of images for both architectures (i386 and x86_64).

After start, JBoss Cloud will automatically form a JBoss AS 5 cluster. No user interaction is required! Just deploy your application and start using it.

New version highlights

Management appliance

We have added a management-appliance. A management appliance is responsible for detecting other running appliances on a network. Actual node list is stored on management appliance. After node discovery is done, management-appliance pushes front-end-appliance address to other nodes. For example if a back-end appliance receives a front-end-appliance address it’ll adjust configuration files and start JBoss AS 5 service. Similar other nodes will configure and start their services.

In case of configuration change, service will be restarted automatically with new settings.

There is no need to start appliances in a specific order, just launch them, they will recognize each other after start. Be sure to launch management-appliance too!

On EC2 you must provide your EC2 credentials as user data to launch management-appliance. If you don't do this it'll boot, but it will not be able to discover other appliances. To inject credentials encode with base64 following string:

access_key: YOUR_ACCESS_KEY
secret_access_key: YOUR_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

To encode this string you can use for example this page. Passing this data to management-appliance i really simple. If you're using Amazon AWS Management Console, just click Show advanced options and put your encoded string into User Data field.

If you're building management appliance from source. Just run:

rake appliance:management-appliance:ec2:run

I'll automatically inject appropriate data.

Full set of images are now available

Beta5 is the first release with full images stack available for download. Now we provide both, 32 and 64 bit AMIs and packages for other virtualization platforms in both architectures, too. Just grab them and tell us how it feels.

EC2 support improved

AMIs are now running with newest available kernel. Proper modules are also included.

Dependency check before building appliance

For those who want to build own images using rake tasks there is a RPM packages dependency check added. You know if build will succeed before it is started. It’ll save some time in case of creating new images. More info on using this feature you can find in my previous post.

Upgrades

We have also upgraded some packages to newest available versions:

• JBoss AS 5.1.0.GA
• mod_cluster 1.0.0.GA
• TorqueBox 1.0.0.Beta12

Where can I get it?

If you're interested in Amazon EC AMIs, just launch these:

i386 architecture:

• front-end-appliance: ami-892ec8e0
• back-end-appliance: ami-4f2cca26
• management-appliance: ami-a72ec8ce
• postgis-appliance: ami-f92ec890
• meta-appliance: ami-d32ec8ba

x86_64 architecture:

• front-end-appliance: ami-a92ec8c0
• back-end-appliance: ami-492cca20
• management-appliance: ami-db2ec8b2
• postgis-appliance: ami-e52ec88c
• meta-appliance: ami-cb2ec8a2

In case you're using other virtualization platforms (eg. VMware or KVM) we are providing a set of images. Just grab, unpack and run them!

Where can I get some help?

We're always (almost) on IRC. Just join #jboss-cloud on freenode! Are you feeling in a mailing list better? No problem, send a blank message to jboss-cloud-subscribe@oddthesis.org to subscribe.

Where is the documentation?

Documentation is as always available on documentation page.

TorqueBox, the project formerly known as JBoss-Rails, has just released version 1.0.0.Beta12.  Details are available over on the TorqueBox site.