Java in the cloud: hardware-free miracle drug?

Grid+Ease < Cloud

Sun definitely did a lot of the early work, but Grid offerings tend to require specific programmatic methods that are not easy to use. Amazon basically took all the hard work of HPC and wrapped it in an API for your enjoyment.

Sun should rule the Cloud, but so far its like a phantom limb.

Project Caroline

Sun has an open source cloud API project called Project Caroline at http://www.projectcaroline.net/ - it can be hosted by anyone, and they plan to support a variety of languages including Java and Ruby (JRuby?). It's feasible to host a Caroline system at Amazon and another on your own machines - thus using the exact same cloud API for all your deployments. Nice huh?

Re; Java in the cloud

Dave,

I am not sure what you are getting at, I guess i came away thinking that even though you don't want to pre-announce your "stealth" start-up, you should give the reader a bigger picture of what you are getting at. It is obvious that you have something in mind that would alleviate some of the deployment and configuration problems associated with the cloud, as i assume your project is not to try and create a new programming language for the cloud. I think you should be more explicit about the concept, and not get too stressed about someone stealing the idea.

I am surprised that you think that enterprises will hold-off on mainstream application deployment in the cloud. I would think that is still up in the air. I mean it is a safe bet that with all the investment in licenses, it will take some time to move away from that model, especially as Oracle completely dominates IT enterprise spending. But the pain is there. Customers are sick of IT's complexity not matching the returns. With standardized interfaces, the cloud could mark an inflection point, and spending would just move completely in the direction of simplified deployment, whether that is Google's cloud or the customer's cloud.

I guess I hope that El Reg gives you a platform to write a couple more articles, and i think you should be explicit about the issues that are being faced by customers, not vendors. You have a decent perspective, coming from the (albeit open source) licensing middleware market, and this should help in explaining the cloud market. I would be very eager to read another article from you that really described the cloud issue, and what are the pieces that need to be addressed to get it going. I wouldn't be surprised if you found it valuable to your start-up to get some feedback from readers on your argument.

I guess what i am saying is that this is a good start, but you should really flesh this article out, and really give some full detail about what the hell you are actually trying to say. Again, you probably have funding, first-to-market advantages are over-rated, and you need feedback, so take a chance, and try and describe better what it is that your new effort is focusing on, as that will be a more compelling piece about the cloud...

Definitely one of the better options, but not a miracle drug

I've spent the last several years working with Java and the last time I checked it was a language, not an OS. That said, Java is one of several excellent languages for cloud computing, not least because of the write once, run anywhere approach.

Cloud computing may, or may not, also be grid - I think these terms are getting confused. Cloud computing is simply running your (web) applications on infrastructure provided by somebody else, in essense a specialised kind of virtual hosting, while grid computing is more about maximising the usage of an existing hardware investment by deploying applications designed to run across many (non-identical) nodes is a seamless fashion. Grids do not need to be internet based or even exposed to the internet at all, although the best example of grid computing, BOINC (runs seti@home and folding@home), is.

The down side of a single language 'code and deploy' environment however is that by definition you need to be able to do everything in the language of your, ok, their, choice which in my experience is simply not possible.

If that were possible, integration and deployment of non-cloud applications would be a whole lot easier in the first place and people would be more willing to run their own systems. Java certainly goes a long way to simplifying integration but even nowI still see Java apps being stiched together with cron jobs, ad-hoc shell scripts and other tricks designed to keep costs down - and not always because it can't be done in J2EE, but also because it is cheaper and quicker to put together something else.

The advantage I see to the Amazon approach is that you essentially get a virtual server, and while that means that deployment and configuration are more involved, it also means that you have more flexibility on how to deploy and configure and the tricks you'd use in your own dedicated environment will still work.

Overall the main issue I see with putting applications in the cloud is that, for a business, web applications tend to be surrounded with secondary applications and utilities that need to interact with the online ones to support end-to-end business processes. Restricting cloud applications to a language runtime only will make it harder to achieve tight integration with the resultant danger that the technical platform starts to drive the business processes rather than the other way round.

That would be a big step backwards because it is only in in recent years that the technical restrictions of available platforms and languages stopped dictating business processes. I don't want a return to the days when I had to explain to an IT director that the business process is great but the technical platform can't support it.

@Oh Gosh by AC

I can't help thinking that you have no experience of Java in the real world. Neither do I think you can blame a programming language for the financial ills of the world unless of course you were hoping that systems would crash under load, thus preventing the trades that have sent stock markets around the world tasking a dive...

Multimedia TV is just the latest place that Java has visited. J2ME for mobile phones is probably the the most-deployed language runtime ever, and is very good at what it does. Java is also very prevelant in the data centre because its fundamental tenet of managing memory for the develop mean that it doesn't crash like C and C++ do. It is not so ideal for small web sites that don't need to scale, however, and that is where Perl, Python et al are able to outscore it and there's no harm in that at all. I run both Java and non-Java web sites and can appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of the variouslanguages.

I suggest you keep your misinformed comments for the tabloid websites, too many IT professionals use this site for you to get away with such a public display of ignorance.