POJO Mojo

We got big news again. This is becoming a monthly occurrence. Stay tuned!

--Ari

Looking for feedback here. With all of Amazon Web Services' amazing progress around MySQL, Hadoop, and more, it occurred to me that there is room for a built-in Terracotta service for Amazon EC2 users as well.

Think about it. My favorite demo of cloud-enablement right now is Chris Richardson's CloudFoundry tool kit. A little known secret about Cloud Foundry is Chris can and has made it support Terracotta as part of app deployment in EC2 or vCloud Express. My thoughts with Chris have always been:

1. Ok, so Cloud Foundry makes push-button app deployment at scale very easy. If I want 2 HTTPDs,4 Tomcats, 1 MySQL master node and a slave for backup, I can just click my way to such a deployment description, add my WAR file, stir and presto...instant production-scale app in the cloud.

2. So, Terracotta could be added to this story in that, once I add my WAR, can't Cloud Foundry detect the presence of Ehcache and Hibernate jars IN MY bundle, and ask me if I want my Hibernate cached, or my Ehcache clustered, or if I wanted clustered caches or ... well you get the idea. A simple checkbox in my app saying "cluster and cache my DB please. Thank you."

I mean, why wouldn't everyone want to free their app from the ball&chain that is the RDBMS. Sure, MySQL in the cloud is kewl and all, but does it help as much as a distributed cache built in to the things I construct apps with every day? Of course it is not as helpful. So, with push-button distributed caching, I can take the app I already have, deploy it to the cloud, and go faster than I used to go in my own datacenter too. Great!

So, my question to everyone out there seeing this is, if it can be push-button now, thanks to Terracotta Ehcache, why not build it into EC2 directly. basically like ordering off a McDonald's menu. "Would you like a distributed cache with that?" "Yes, please!" "Ok, 2 nodes or 4?" "4 please, than you."

So, what do people think?

--Ari