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April 8, 2010
Where's the Terracotta cloud? What's the Terracotta cloud?
posted by ari
Just wanted to touch base w/ you all and provide a revised ETA and set some expectations around Terracotta Cloud Stack.
- Its official name will be Terracotta Cloud Stack. (you may have heard it called Terracotta Cloud or Terracotta Cloud Tools.) It turns out it is a full stack for building and launching applications in most clouds--EC2, Eucalyptus, Rackspace, and vCloud--so we shall call it that.
- It will provide many exciting features in 1st release
- Ability to start an arbitrary number of app instances, Terracotta instances, and DB instances
- built in support for Amazon Elastic Load Balancer
- built in load balancer (based on HAPRoxy) for all other cloud providers
- built in support for Terracotta FX. Just say you want 24 Terracotta's and it will create 12 2-member stripes to connect your application to
- ability to pull software artifacts from S3 / Walrus so you can store your app as 1 tarball, Terracotta as another, and the DB installation as yet a 3rd and we will dynamically install the appropriate software onto each node we deploy at runtime
- You can grow a cluster automatically in response to ELB autoscale events or any event you want to wire in from your management framework of choice (Munin for example).
- ability to runtime rewrite app configuration based on dynamic variable substitutions. You can insert a Terracotta config URL into your ehcache.xml, quartz config, and Tomcat sessions configuration on the fly. You can insert JDBC connection URLs and Hibernate HBM db configurations into your app files on the fly as well. And you can tell the Terracotta server nodes about the array size and shape you want at runtime as well.
- Last, the system ships with Examinator pre-configured and publicly available in Amazon EC2 for you to start / stop a real-world application right away. Within 30 minutes you can be running a cloud with a load balancer, DB, Jetty, and Terracotta on, say 30 JVMs all by adding just your EC2 credentials to a configuration file
- It is currently being documented and QAed and its alpha release is imminent.
- For the alpha phase, you will be able to download the stack upon registration at Terracotta.org and run w/ an FX array over at Amazon EC2. Our intent is to get the Stack into folks' hands so that you can provide feedback to us right away and we can plan the beta and GA accordingly thereafter.
Fun times! Exciting stuff, I think. So far, we have an ecosystem of about 5 of the world's biggest software and virtualization vendors all working together to incorporate direct support for launching and managing their technologies directly from within our Cloud stack. So, GA should not only introduce the features outlined above but also come with an ecosystem of support software that will run readily in this environment.
Stay tuned!
--Ari
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Comments
Do you also support HAProxy on EC2? That would be great because ELB doesn't support SSL termination and thus is unusable stand-alone in a multitenant setting :( It's nice though that ELB finally supports sticky sessions.
Posted by: Kai Virkki at April 8, 2010 11:55 AM
Kai,
It is great they implemented sticky session, I agree. As for HAProxy on EC2, we will be able to do that soon, yes. We are about to announce support for Citrix NetScaler though. Once we get over that hump, I'll come back around to HAProxy for EC2. Shouldn't take more than a few weeks :)
Posted by: ARI ZILKA at April 9, 2010 6:55 AM