Hi,

From the side of technology, what we need to run cloudstack management
server is J2EE container (JPA, JTX and so on).
As for J2EE contianer, there's a TomEE in apache project which
is less generally available in common distribution packages.
I think Tomcat is an appropriate option referring the availability.
# But at the same time, I think TomEE would be appropriate because
# cloudstack is also an apache project now.

We would need servlet because we need web UI to take control.

For configuration files, I think whatever container we choose,
those files would be look like as tomcat at last. There would
be no big difference.

(2013/03/03 22:04), Noa Resare wrote:
So, when working with the 4.1 packaging issues I have more than once been
intensely frustrated with the current tomcat situation.

To recap: Some cloustack components are set up as web applications and
requires a servlet container as their execution environment. The current
solution to provide such as servlet container is to have the cloudstack
package depend on an Apache Tomcat 6 package provided by the OS
distribution. Cloudstack then ships copies of the configuration files
needed by tomcat to run along with init scripts that bootstraps tomcat in a
way that references the cloudstack shipped artifacts. This setup has many
problems.

# Cloudstack assumes that it's configuration files will be enough in sync
with what the externally provided tomcat expects.

# Lots and lots of fairly esoteric config files included in cloudstack
makes the learning curve steep

# Tomcat setup, as it stands without trying any specific hackery to make it
do other stuff, is a labyrinth of shell scripts

# Things gets even more complicated when cloudstack invokes tomcat provided
scripts.

# tomcat has it's own log files for the early parts of it's startup.

It shouldn't need to be this hard. webapps are standardized for a reason,
and the requirements we have on a servlet execution environments are not
that special (one webapp on /client listening one port, and possibly
another webapp for the aws stuff listening on another port)

As a proof of concept I hacked together the starting points of
a replacement for this whole mess yesterday, a few tens of lines of code
setting up an embedded jetty web container. A few lines of code to parse a
config file, set up logging and spawn an embedded servlet container.

Points of discussion:

# What features do we need for our servlet container? Do I miss
anything obvious?

# Do we have some kind of loyalty towards tomcat, it being one of the main
apache projects after all? 2 minutes of googling seems to indicate that
there are embedded tomcat options as well, but I know jetty better so that
seemed like a better stating point for my proof of concept.

My proof of concept code is available here:
https://github.com/noaresare/incubator-cloudstack/tree/noa/runner

/noa





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