"No Fuss, No Muss: Developing Scalable Applications for the Cloud, enabling an easy expansion and contraction of resources as requirements change is a pretty pithy summation of the draw cloud computing has for many users. At least that's how Sun Principal Engineer Ted Leung put things during the session he and Sun Product Line Manager for developer tools Ashwin Rao led at 2009 JavaOne.

Attractions of the Cloud

The services that Cloud Computing comprises, as Leung outlined them, include:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): virtualized hardware, storage services, compute services

• Stack as a Service: Virtual Machine images (stripped-down Linux all the way to infrastructure support software)

• Platform as a Service (PaaS): AppEngine, for example, or Heroku, or Zembly (which addresses the problem domain of social networking)

• Software as a Service (SaaS): SalesForce.com is the prime example

Problems of the Cloud

Latency to the storage was the first issue Leung identified or within the cloud for calculated services. These shortcomings require that development and deployment become more deeply entwined, he suggested.

Other problems that were identified include security (constrained by vendor), audit/regulatory issues, and the risk of essentially being with a single-source provider.

Leung then turned to some of the problems per area (for example, in IaaS, one must handle app-level scaling) before having a look at the work facing developers with regard to issues involving messaging around what's used to connect to services (for example, controlling priorities) and improving availability.

The Current Tool Landscape

At this point in the session, Ashwin Rao assumed the podium to survey the developer tools available today. He noted that the future will have development with the cloud, for the cloud, and in the cloud.

• Examples of developing with the cloud include the Amazon Web Services Toolkit with Eclipse (which extends the Web Tools platform, to deploy, run debug against), G-Eclipse, and Project Speedway.

• Examples of developing for the cloud, presented by Rao include Google App Engineering SDK, Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio, and the Force.com IDE (part of SalesForce.com).

• Examples of developing in the cloud, which he called development as a service, include Force.com Builder, Bungee Connect, Project Speedway, and Zembly.

Sun's Cloud Tools

Rao summarized Sun's "Connected Developer" tool complements as Kenai.com, Zembly.com, Project Speedway, and O'Malley, noting that the NetBeans IDE is tightly integrated with the tools.

• Kenai is a Cloud-centric software project management tool, provides a core set of app-building services

• Zembly consists of Cloud-based tools for social networking apps (Development as a Service)

• O'Malley is a catalog of discoverable applications

• Speedway provides universal access to OpenSolaris on SPARC-processor-based Sun systems

More Information

Presentation slides of the talk - will include full details when they are available.

A Sun Guide to Getting Started with Cloud Computing [...read more...]

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