Just found this cool stuff — Terracotta. An open source software provide distributed scalability and availability to JVM. This is from their home page, I guess all Java guys who ever dream to have a nice scalable solution will happy to dead when they see those and if it could possibly done in easy steps:

P Session Clustering Distributed Caches Cluster OSS Frameworks

Distributed Workload Cluster Spring, Webflow & Events Cluster any Java POJO

A great blog post Amazon Web Services (EC2 & S3) - The Future of Data Centre Computing? Part 2 have shown how to install Terracotta in Amazon EC2 and make a scalable tomcat cluster, and in it’s comment I found something even more interesting:

More details on EHCache support are here - http://www.terracotta.org/confluence/display/integrations/EHCache

Also, OSCache has been clustered by us for a long time, but we have never had any effort to wrap it up into a Config Module ala EHCache. A forum user had success with OSCache (and describes how to get it working) here - http://forums.terracotta.org/forums/posts/list/197.page

Distributed OSCache is what I cried for years! It’s unbelievable that those guys are doing all of those nice stuff and completely open source!

I will spend some time on it and do some test by myself.  Wish this stuff will really work!!!

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Finally I got an EC2 account, it cost me wait in the line for around 2 months!

Cool tools that really useful to hack around EC2, S3

EC2 Firefox UI:

The extension can be installed by opening the .xpi file contained in the archive that includes this README file. Alternatively, the latest version of the .xpi file is hosted in Amazon S3 at the following URL:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2ui.xpi

S3 Firefox:

Provides a graphical, FTP-like interface to S3.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3247/

Play around

With EC2 firefox UI it’s pretty much easier to get around, esp. for first EC2 users like me. I just pick one amazon’s AIM to have a try. Two things need to notice when using EC2 FF UI:

1. Need to create a key pair before launch any instance, this is used for login through ssh

EC2 ff UI generated a OpenSSH private key, but I use PuTTY, PuTTY don’t recognize OpenSSH’s *.pem format certificate, so I need to use PuTTY keygen to convert the key to PuTTY’s ppk.

2. Need to enable SSH port(22) in “security groups” tab. By default all ports blocked so no way to connect.

Then I got this screen:

Using username “root”.
Authenticating with public key “imported-openssh-key”

__| __|_ ) Rev: 2
_| ( /
___|\___|___|

Welcome to an EC2 Public Image

Apache2+MySQL4

__ c __ /etc/ec2/release-notes.txt

[root@domU-12-31-35-00-15-A1 ~]#

Wow! I will play around and tweak more in it, and I probably will use EC2 in my next project.

In compare with Godaddy’s virtual dedicated hosting, EC2 is expensive, however EC2 have so many  advantages that is really valuable for a serious startup or project:

* Launch a new instance (like add a new server) is just minutes.  Godaddy or other hosting service generally need 24 hours or more;

* Dynamically change how many instance(servers) u need, and can controlled programmablly, I think that’s the best of EC2, so image that my web site have huge access at day time but few visitors at night, I can launch 10 servers to serv the high traffic, and only use 1 server at night! and that’s full automatically !  That’s a cool feature that no other hosting company can provide. And I believe that’s the future of hosting!

* Fee is charged by instance, other hosting providers, once you decided, you have to pay by all the time even u don’t need it.

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