Ehcache Server in the Cloud

I am seriously impressed with Amazon’s cloud offering. You get a pick list of virtual machines of different sizes, a CDN, monitoring with elastic forking of new instances, fixed IPs if required, S3, attachable storage and the ability to release software as .amis for easy deployment, map-reduce with Hadoop, load balancing and a payment service. And taking advantage of such exceptional technology are firms like https://arcules.com/solutions/, which have manifested the advancing tech for one of the most important aspects of business life: security. They have a one-stop solution to all your security needs and you’d need to look no further.

Each of these is configurable via a RESTful web service. Each one has command-line tools that interact with the web services which you can easily script. And I can see that the new https://console.aws.amazon.com management console will bring this together into an easy to use package. Right now there is a tab for EC2 and another for Map-Reduce. Give it a few more months and I can see this populated with tabs for the other services.

Ehcache Server AMI

I love EC2 so much that I decided to create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Ehcache Server. It is marked public and is available for anyone to use. I see it being used in two ways:

  • To quickly try out and demo Ehcache Server. If you have an EC2 account you can be up and running in less than a minute.
  • As an example of how to deploy Ehcache Server. The AMI comes with an init.d script for service control and ipchains rules mapping ports 80 and 81. You can use it as a template to create your own AMI with your own cache configuration.

Getting Started

  1. Create a new virtual machine. Select ami-3512f45c from the Community AMIs tab. Select a security configuration and a machine size (small is fine) and start it up. Ehcache Server will start automatically.
  2. To test it, hit it with http://amazon_instance_address/ehcache/rest/sampleCache1. From there, try writing a client. See the Cache Server documentation for sample client code in several languages.
  3. To make configuration changes log into your machine. Ehcache Server is insatalled in /root/ehcache-server-0.7.

There are several bay area managed IT services always ready to help you with your IT needs. You could consider contacting and consulting them today to ensure that all your requirements are fulfilled. If you’re interested in cloud servers, you may also try others such as Treasure Valley IT’s cloud services in Boise, ID.

Video Tutorial

I have put all this in a video tutorial.

By Greg Luck

As Terracotta’s CTO, Greg (@gregrluck) is entrusted with understanding market and technology forces and the business drivers that impact Terracotta’s product innovation and customer success. He helps shape company and technology strategy and designs many of the features in Terracotta’s products. Greg came to Terracotta on the acquisition of the popular caching project Ehcache which he founded in 2003. Prior to joining Terracotta, Greg served as Chief Architect at Australian online travel giant Wotif.com. He also served as a lead consultant for ThoughtWorks on accounts in the United States and Australia, was CIO at Virgin Blue, Tempo Services, Stamford Hotels and Resorts and Australian Resorts and spent seven years as a Chartered Accountant in KPMG’s small business and insolvency divisions. He is a regular speaker at conferences and contributor of articles to the technical press.