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.

Hosting Grails Applications

Back in the day when clients would ask me if they should buy a home PC or build a home PC in order to save money, I knew what to do. I would ask them if they wanted a tool or a hobby. That made the answer easy; the ones that wanted a tool should buy, the ones that thought of it as a hobby would enjoy building a PC.

I'm facing that same predicament with Grails hosting . Originally the cost for a server with enough memory for Grails hosting was cost prohibitive. I couldn't justify $70 a month without a clear, quick path to become self-supporting. So I built a server and thought I would self-host and live with limited bandwidth. That greatly reduced the cost and removed the need to make a profit. Then I found a way to get free hosting for a year, and jumped at it. The Layered Tech hosting has been great.

I have learned that I don't enjoy the sysadmin responsibilities though. I don't mind so much taking care of the server I can reach out and touch, but the remote one I'd prefer not to deal with. It also is difficult to have multiple applications running simultaneously on one virtual server with 512 MB RAM when the WAR files are 20+ MB large. My attempts to use shared libraries in order to reduce the size of the WAR files on GlassFish V2 were unsuccessful. The process seems to be better documented for GlassFish V3 Prelude. If I go forward with OpenSolaris 2008.11 and GlassFish V3 Prelude, I will be moving away from Layered Tech's supported offering. I'm all right with this because I know I don't want to be a sysadmin when I grow up. I want a tool for hosting Grails applications because I don't want hosting Grails applications to be a hobby, I want developing Grails applications to be my hobby.

Here is what I'm considering as the plan for 2009:

• Tweak the test server and turn it into a kick-butt development workstation
• Read The Definitive Guide to Grails, Second Edition
• Develop Grails 1.1 applications using NetBeans 6.5 on GlassFish V3 Prelude
• Read Grails in Action
  
• Find a hosting solution that is less of a hobby and more like a tool.

I Can Empathize

Jan has a good point in this post... jan blog: It is very expensive to work with Grails. I got lucky when I found free hosting for a year. More accurately I was in the right place at the right time. If I hadn't already been experimenting with OpenSolaris and GlassFish for hosting Grails applications with a MySQL database, I wouldn't have seen the offer for a year of free hosting from OStatic. If I hadn't seen the offer I wouldn't have signed up and meet the requirements to get the free hosting. I have a VPS with 512 MB RAM. Even with the large size of a Grails .war file it will deploy multiple applications. I would like to try using shared libraries to be able to make very small .war files and host lots of applications. I haven't been able to get that to work on GlassFish V2 and most of the documentation I am finding for this feature is for GlassFish V3 Prelude. My hosting provider doesn't support V3 Prelude at this time so I'm not able to go that route just yet. When you consider it only costs $20 a month to host a full blown Java app that seems very reasonable. But how many $20's a month does it take to become unreasonable? I'm lucky, I still have 10 months to worry about how to pay the monthly hosting bill and I expect by then I will be able to find a provider supporting GlassFish V3, I'll have figured shared libraries out, and the economics of hosting a bunch of little applications will be reasonable.

With Much Appreciation

Where do you get a year of free hosting? I got mine from OStatic. They got it from Sun. It is provided by Layered Tech. What can I do with it? Anything on Solaris using GlassFish and MySQL. What will I do with it? Something in Grails. Thank you OStatic, thank you Sun, thank you Layered Tech.

Free Hosting

Good news, I have a hosting account with no charge for a year. Bad news, I don't have a web site to host. The goal is to have a site that will be self-supporting when the free year of hosting is up. The clock is ticking, the account is already set up and will cost money in less than a year. It will take some time for whatever it is to gain traction and generate even the small amount of revenue necessary to break even. The normal cost is $60 per month. Labor is available, development and test environments exist. Ideas are lacking. A good idea would be nice, a good idea that can be implemented quickly would be great. Think, think, think.