Elastic Beanstalk : On a New Road

Elastic Beanstalk	Wednesday January 26, 2011
I've been doing some web development lately and when Amazon announced their Elastic Beanstalk Java EE PAAS, I decided to take it out for a spin. It's a good first release. The restriction to eclipse+tomcat makes me a little grumpy, but since I'm just doing servlets, it's OK. The real killer, the one that's got me close to abandoning it, is the development round-trip cycle time. I've gotten totally spoiled by the rapid redeploy feature of NetBeans+GlassFish. When the cycle time from edit to run is less than a second, you develop differently. The edit->run time with elastic beanstalk is a couple of minutes, which totally breaks my concentration. The upside is that I'm getting better at Solitaire :-)

Comments[10]

Comments:

You're just spoilt! I still am quite happy with a 60s cycle time and think harder before hitting deploy... B^> Rgds Damon

Posted by Damon Hart-Davis on January 26, 2011 at 01:10 PM PST #

Is Elastic Beanstalk really meant for use in a development environment? I use AWS for production and testing at my current job, but use IDEA and Jetty locally. Once I commit, our build server can push to AWS, or I can push a WAR file myself. It seems like latency itself would would be a killer no matter what. WAR files don't tend to be small.

Posted by Lucas Ward on January 26, 2011 at 03:21 PM PST #

Guess you have to start thinking in cycles and meta cycles. In a code cycle you would use your local J2EE container for your one second round trip and once it is more polished you cycle and deploy it to the Beanstalk. Locally you should have similar short cycle times with Tomcat and the myEclipseIDE (a set of Eclipse plug-ins). I'm sure the myEclipseIDE guys will more than happy set you up. :-) stw

Posted by Stephan H. Wissel on January 26, 2011 at 06:00 PM PST #

@Stephan Please don't torture James or others by still calling it J2EE. He was at Sun when the unlucky name choice was made, but it certainly came from some marketing "Spin Doctor" or similar source, not himself ;-)

Posted by Werner Keil on January 26, 2011 at 11:32 PM PST #

I feel the same pain when i see people leaving NetBeans for the second round... You see how netbeans does hotdeploy to glassfish using the gfdeploy directory? Technically it would just be a matter of having this gfdeploy in the AWMS server and doing something like an svn commit to the elastic beanstalk, then asking the AWMS server to restart the application. But again, even though the technical barrier could be overcome in a couple of weeks, I am sure the political / financial barreer of getting the amazon team and the tomcat or glassfish team working together could take lots longer... I've got all my hopes in CloudBees. Have yo checked out the on-the-cloud hudson service? it is so cool, you pay per each minute hudson runs... I really like that

Posted by Pablo on January 26, 2011 at 11:46 PM PST #

By the way, just curious... what are you working on these days James?

Posted by Pablo on January 26, 2011 at 11:47 PM PST #

Hi James, What do you think of Google App Engine?

Posted by Jvy on January 27, 2011 at 06:33 AM PST #

Ha-ha-ha! That was good one... :) Actually, I threw away plain GWT and SmartGWT into a trash bin and replaced them with Vaadin widget set due to the same reason: compilation is too long on GWT/SmartGWT, while Vaadin compiles within one-two seconds, since it is actually all pre-compiled.

Posted by BM on January 27, 2011 at 11:30 PM PST #

It is refreshing to read about the importance of rapid build and development times. I complain about latency on the mouse with all these virtualized environments they keep asking developers to use and it seems to get lost in the noise. Computers and networks are actually very slow for most things I do.

Posted by rinaldo on January 28, 2011 at 06:59 PM PST #

Solitaire!!! You actually moved away from the Unix platform??

Posted by Mayuresh Kathe on January 30, 2011 at 01:14 AM PST #

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