Grails Hosting in the Cloud

How simple can hosting become? I’m not interested in a private cloud or putting servers in a public cloud, I want a cloud web site. To me the difference is with a server in the cloud you need to configure and manage the application server, while hosting an application in the cloud allows the provider to manage the application server for you. Ideally I’d like a solution like Heroku with their instant Ruby platform. What are the choices for completely managed Grails hosting today?

Morph Labs

Used by grailspodcast.com – The Groovy & Grails Podcast.
Morph Labs appears to be ready to manage everything except writing your application. With Exist thrown into the mix they may even do that for you too.

Google App Engine

Used by groovytweets ::: groovy in the twitter universe.
Google App Engine is from Google so I assume it will eventually dominate the Earth and any additional planets that tap into our Internet. Long denied Java love this solution grew from Google’s amazing amount of cheap servers and can now host Groovy and Grails.

Cloud Foundry

I don’t have an example site but Marcel’s excellent blog post provides detailed instructions on how to deploy a Grails application. There are a ton of comments wishing you didn’t need to bring your own fulltime Amazon EC2 instance with you as that sets the floor for pricing above most dedicated Virtual Private Server offerings.

Stax

This one came from a comment on Marcel’s blog and it looks promising. They web site claims to support Grails and it can scale down below a full EC2 instance as well as up to multi-server clusters. Being able to begin with less than a 24/7 server instance sounds appealing but may need further investigation.

Something Else

I’m certain that I must have missed something.  There are probably lots of other capable solutions because there seem to be new offerings every week. Of course they need to support Java. I looked at Rackspace and Joyent but they didn’t seem to cover the management and/or Java requirements. If you know of additional services for Grails hosting in the cloud please let me know in the comments. I’d like to develop a comprehensive list.

Resource List from kellyrob99.com: The Kaptain on ... stuff

I found this great list of resources today:

Do you make keeping up with technology a priority? Have you found a way to prevent drowning in the vast sea of content AND still keep abreast of everything you want to? Me neither, but here’s where I go to learn new things, find solutions and keep up with the general state of the union regarding software I use; not to mention keeping track of what new tools are available to speed development.  This is far from an exhaustive list but I wanted to concentrate on primarily free sources of information and tooling. Yes ladies and gentlemen pretty much everything mentioned on this page requires at most an internet connection and a web browser to use.kellyrob99.com, The Kaptain on … stuff, Sep 2009

You should read the whole article.

Waiting on Oracle Sunset

The worry over MySQL may hold up Oracle's acquisition of Sun. Sun has so much hardware and software yet it is the potential Oracle ownership of the open source database that could be a problem for competition. I don't know that I disagree but it is interesting that an open source product could be cause for an anti-competitive issue. If the competitors (SAP and Microsoft) really felt this way couldn't they get the bits? It is the chance that Oracle could slack off on future development of MySQL that seems to be the problem. Europe to Review Oracle’s Takeover of Sun

The Pragmatic Programmers Have a Free Magazine

For three months there has been a magazine available from the The Pragmatic Programmers and I just found out. Scott Davis has a nice Groovy article in the September edition.