FAQ

Top Questions

Can you provide an overview of Cloud Foundry?Top

Cloud Foundry is the first self-service, pay-as-you-go, public cloud platform that supports a complete application lifecycle for deploying and scaling full-feature Spring, Grails, and Java Applications in the cloud. Cloud Foundry integrates the world’s most popular Java Web application technologies and leverages SpringSource’s expertise and market-leading technology and products into an enterprise Java cloud platform that takes full advantage of the power of elastic cloud computing.

Cloud Foundry greatly reduces the complexity of cloud computing and offers complete application lifecycle management for running Spring, Grails, and Java web applications, including those with database dependencies, in a Cloud Foundry-managed platform running on Amazon Web Services. With just a few clicks of the mouse, applications can be deployed to a load-balanced and secure platform running on Amazon Web Services. Cloud Foundry monitors and manages the applications, automatically fixes failed servers and instances, and auto-scales applications as the load fluctuates.

What is the pricing and availability of Cloud Foundry?Top

The SpringSource Cloud Foundry Enterprise Java Cloud service is available immediately at CloudFoundry.com in beta and is free to use. Normal cloud service provider fees still apply. Pricing will be announced after an extended beta period and will follow standard cloud service pricing models. During the coming months, SpringSource will extend Cloud Foundry’s capabilities with enhanced cloud management features and other services. SpringSource will bring Cloud Foundry’s capabilities to Amazon Web Services as well as VMware’s vCloud service provider partners and internal VMware vSphere environments – providing infrastructure choice, deployment flexibility, and enterprise services.

What technologies is Cloud Foundry bulit on?Top

Cloud Foundry integrates the open source Cloud Tools project, Apache HTTP Server, tc Server (SpringSource's enterprise Apache Tomcat), MySQL, and Hyperic into a cohesive enterprise Java cloud platform:

  • - Java 1.6
  • - Apache HTTP Server 2.2.3-11
  • - tc Server 6.0.19
  • - MySQL 5.0.45
  • - JRE 1.6.0_4-b12
  • - CentOS 5.2
  • - Jmeter 2.2
  • - Jets3t 0.5

Cloud Foundry automatically configures MySQL for master/slave replication and uses Apache Web Server to load balance across one or more tc Server application servers.

What other technologies will Cloud Foundry integrate in the future?Top

Over the coming months, SpringSource will enhance the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite to enable developers to easily upload Java web applications from development to the Cloud Foundry platform and launch them in the cloud. We will also be evaluating technologies and partners that can address a range of enterprise Java cloud platform capabilities, including alternative databases, data caching, messaging infrastructure, etc. More details will be provided in the future.

How do I Access the MySQL Database?Top

One challenge when deploying on Amazon EC2 is that the IP address of the database is assigned dynamically. There are a few different ways the application can access the MySQL master database. One option is to use a host name. If MySQL is running on the same instance as Tomcat then the application can use 'localhost' to access the database. Alternatively, if MySQL is running on the different instance then it can use 'dbmaster'.

The second way approach is to launch the application with system property that specifies the database host name. For example, this JVM option "-DdbHostName=${databasePrivateDnsName}" sets the the system property 'dbHostName' to the MySQL master's host name. A Spring/Java application can use a PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer to substitute this value in the database url, e.g. jdbc:mysql://${dbHostName}:3306/.A Grails application use something like this in the grails-app/conf/DataSource.groovy:


    environments {
        development {
            dataSource {
                dbCreate = "create-drop" // One of 'create', 'create-drop', 'update'
                url = "jdbc:mysql://${System.getProperty("dbHostName", "localhost")}/..."
            }
        }
    }

What is the Cloud Tools project?Top

Cloud Tools is an open source project led by Chris Richardson and is a set of tools for deploying, managing and testing Java EE applications on Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and VMware environments.. The Cloud Tools project has three main components:

  1. EC2Deploy - the core framework. This framework manages virtual instances (e.g. EC2), configures MySQL, Tomcat, Terracotta and Apache and deploys the application. See this blog entry for an overview.
  2. Maven and Grails plugins that use EC2Deploy to deploy an application
  3. Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that are configured to run Tomcat and work with EC2Deploy. See list of installed software.

More details for Cloud Tools can be found here.

What is the Cloud Foundry Ready logo?Top

The Cloud Foundry Ready logo is displayed on websites or products that integrate with Cloud Foundry, making the Cloud Foundry service directly accessible through those partnered technologies. The integrations and partnerships make it even easier to deploy Java web applications into the cloud. Examples include: