Deploying Grails Applications in the Cloud

Deploying Grails applications in the cloud

In this preview of his Gr8Conf US talk, we'll take an overview of several PaaS Cloud providers that support Grails application deployment (AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku, Cloud Foundry, Google App Engine) and examine the advantages/disadvantages of building and deploying Grails applications in the cloud. We will be comparing and contrasting these cloud providers to understand the key differences in their approaches to cloud services.

We'll also discuss application architecture issues unique to a cloud environment and some key hurdles (even a few non-technical ones!) to watch out for when migrating from a traditional data center into the cloud. Some examples of architectural issues would be dealing with include application configuration, ephemeral storage, autoscaling/load balancing, caching, and data management. In terms of hurdles we will discuss topics such as security, IT politics, and financial/cost concerns. This presentation will be based on my team's experiences with migrating a sizable Grails application into AWS. We will wrap up with a demo of deploying a Grails application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Amazon RDS (MySQL) and look at what goes on ""behind the scenes"" when an application is deployed in AWS.

Speaker: Ken Liu

Ken is a software engineer for the IEEE based in the NYC metro area. He leads the development of several websites for IEEE Spectrum (http://spectrum.ieee.org). Ken has been working with Groovy and Grails exclusively for the past three years and has over 15 years of experience building large Java-based applications in many diverse industries including publishing, pharma, automotive, telecom, and travel. Ken holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech.