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Thoughts about cloud hosting for Grails applications

A few years ago nobody probably heard about "cloud computing" term. Except maybe for engineers building customer access portals, people involved in design of sites like Facebook and Twitter and their alikes. But as more and more people get connected to the internet with high-speed access, traffic figures are going up for everyone no matter what you host - a small online store or a mainstream blog.

I feel sorry for some of my clients, who chose to have their websites hosted on shared hosting with providers known for their infamous overselling - Godaddy, 1and1 and others. As they put about 100-150 accounts on one server with web traffic increasing for one of the clients it negatively reflects for the rest and your website visitors start experiencing slower load and response times. Eventually users simply hit back button in their browser tired of waiting for the website to answer and web page to load. And this is how you lose your customers.

So what should you do to avoid this? What should you do, if you are a developer who designs an application and expects an overwhelming response to it?

• You can get yourself a VPS (just like i got one for this website from Linode.COM) and grow it, if you you see increase in traffic.
• You can get yourself a number of VPSes - thus making it into a cluster, if you grow really big.
• And finally you can migrate your application to the "cloud" - using Amazon Web Services or other cloud hosting providers.

... but here is a catch. When you buy service from Amazon or anyone else, it is your task to configure it. So it is you who takes care about security and vulnerability of your application. Amazon only gives you basic directions, as to what ports should be open and which you want closed. And if your Postfix daemon does not work - it's your problem.

Another thing is configuring a cluster, because you aim for your application to grow. If you are just a developer, you will spend time reading about different solutions out there, for example HeartBeat and Pacemaker to manage high-availability of your application.

Doesn't it sound like a lot of work for a developer, when all you really want to do is just write web application and serve it to the world?

For Grails developers SpringSource offers a free service of CloudFoundry, which is based atop of Amazon Cloud Services. But nowhere it answers even a simple question about disk space needs. If i will upload more and more content for my application - will the "cloud" take care about it automatically? Will i hit the limit and when?

Designing your application with scalability in mind, creating a hosting environment, monitoring it, taking care about backups and a lot more... Is there a simple solution to use?

Tags: amazon, cloudfoundry, grails, springsource

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