Hey all,
Some collective brain picking if I can. We've been uhhming and ahhing
about the way we currently host our services. For the most part moving
our apps to the cloud is entirely impractical for various reasons.
Infrastructure that most need to access would never be permitted to be
accessed from outside of accessible and physically auditable area.
The bulk of our apps are java apps, running from individual tomcat
services on our servers. I assume the reason for that is a failure of
any individual application doesn't take down multiple apps, though it
does mean we waste a fair bit of memory (albeit that's a cheap resource).
A number of them are coded badly, IMO, and can only be run in one
location at a time with app level cron processes and the like that cause
serious headaches. Recoding isn't a feasible option, or so I'm told
every time I suggest it. At the moment if a server dies I'm going to
have to do a fair bunch of manual work to bring up the apps on other
servers and make sure all is good.
What I'm wondering about are what my options might be for Tomcat or
similar Platform as a Service clustering solution, and curious if there
are anything suitable?
It's possibly a total pipe dream but I'd like to abstract away from the
hardware/OS as much as possible, and the more intelligent and
self-healing the better. I could go down the straight VMWare/Xen IaaS
route internally. On my pipe-dream list is to get puppet/chef config
management in place, and I could code something tied into monitoring to
automatically trigger failovers in case of hardware failure, or even
smarter to automatically juggle tomcats based on server & applet load.
I'd like to pool my options and see if there are more suitable
alternatives, though. No point duplicating effort if it's already been
done!
Free is naturally desirable, and Open Source ideal, but its not an
absolute requirement.
I'm fairly new to the java hosting world, this is the first place I've
worked that uses them. I must admit I've steadily gone from 'Urgh
black-box' to 'Wooo black-box!' regarding Tomcat. When things start
going weird in a tomcat instance its nice to be able to take the Windows
route and just turn it off and on again, and then pass on any
stack-traces to devs to investigate/fix. Especially given most of our
tomcat apps start up in <5s.
Paul
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