Programming Grails

Chapter 10. The Cloud

“The cloud” is a buzz topic right now, and for good reason. Cloud computing isn’t the best approach for every deployment, but for many scenarios, using a cloud provider can save time and money, and make your applications less susceptible to traffic surges. It can also greatly simplify your deployment process and IT needs.

There is no one definition of cloud computing, and it is starting to become a misused term (some are now referring to any online service as a cloud service). In fact, there are three models of cloud computing: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a Service (SaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS). They’re all cloud services though—meaning, they’re available over the Internet as metered (“pay as you go”) services. SaaS examples include popular consumer services like Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, and YouTube and also more specialized software services available in a metered fashion over the Internet. Amazon EC2, VMware vCloud, and Linode are popular IaaS options, and Amazon Elastic BeanStalk, Heroku, Cloud Foundry, and Cloudbees are popular PaaS options. Although Grails developers may integrate or create SaaS solutions, we will focus on IaaS and PaaS, because they are more integral to the development and deployment process. Also note that although Google App Engine is a viable option for traditional Java applications, Grails applications typically don’t do well there; consider using Gaelyk instead to take advantage of a Groovy-based Grails-like ...