After holidays I have worked on some tickets assigned to upcoming JBoss Cloud Beta5 release. Because these are adding some good stuff I will briefly describe what's new.

There was a lot of work done on making JBoss Cloud more EC2 friendly. First of all we added finally appropriate kernel modules for Amazon EC2 XEN kernels (we're using newest ones available — 2.6.21 instead of default 2.6.18). This fixed a lot of errors in messages log and allowed us to run meta-appliance on EC2! You can build JBoss Cloud images directly using our AMI.

Till now we provided only 32 bit images of our appliances. This is over now! We have 64 bit support for all virtualizaton platforms!

There was a lot of work on refactoring, writing new tests (yes, we have some!) and validation rules for config file. You can now hack JBoss Cloud more safely. There is a new rake task added:

rake appliance:APPLIANCE_NAME:validate:dependencies

This task validates additional packages added to appliance definition files. How it is working? It takes all specified repositories and looks if every added package is available in one of them. Simply, but saves a lot of time (you don't need to build appliance to be sure your packages are resolvable). Want to check all available appliances?

rake appliance:all:validate:dependencies

We have also a brand new mod_cluster 1.0.0.CR2 in our appliances.

Uploading packages to remote server is smarter and more fancy — we have a progress bar! Now you know if you should order an espresso or a whole coffee pot.

Signing packages is done also via rake task:

rake rpm:RPM_NAME:sign

It'll sign RPM_NAME package with key specified in your ~/.rpmmacros file. More info will be available in documentation, really soon.

Pssst, I build especially for you some pre-release 64 bit EC2 AMIs: meta-appliance — ami-27ae484e, front-end-appliance — ami-04ae486d and finally back-end-appliance — ami-01ae4868. Grab it!

Be prepared for Beta5 release!