Adrian Cole discusses open source Platform as a Service
Date: Jun 02, 2011At JBoss World 2011, Adrian Cole, an independent developer and consultant who is closely associated with jclouds, talks with SearchSOA.com reporter Jack Vaughan about open source options for platform as a service (PaaS) and other cloud concerns.
What new developments will we see from the new announcements JBoss is making?
JBoss is into Open Source, meaning free software. That's free and open – meaning you can participate in the community. But it's also free as in beer – meaning that you can use it without paying them. Extending that to cloud deployments means they're providing free runtimes. You can actually run your services on the OpenShift platform. So developers can not only develop their applications using a JBoss platform (or PHP or any other supported runtime), but they can actually put them into the cloud without paying. Before they made platform software in a free way but now they're running it in the cloud on your behalf so that's a big new difference for them.
You are involved in Infinispan which is at the heart of the new data grid JBoss is announcing. Now JBoss is talking about bringing that data grid into the JCP process; what do you think about that?
The JCP is where all Java standards come from. Portable Java platforms are possible because there is some sort of a JCP standard for them. The new hooks that are being offered for traditional PaaS offerings – from Google Apps Engine or wherever – are enticing and developers want to use them, but vendors don't always push those hooks into standards, so you can't always guarantee you can safely migrate on and off that platform. As we look at the future of JBoss-style technologies, it makes sense for the vendors to take developer API hooks to the JCP for standardization. One of the tenets of the JBoss ideal is to use standards that exist and create new standards for the needs of new platforms. A huge example there is data grids. The data grid JSR is going to be a way to switch between them and a competitor and provide a choice for the customer.
Could you give us a little bit of the history of jclouds? I know that project is close to your heart.
jClouds helps you deal with a lack of standards. There are a bunch of different providers, and they don't have a standard API right now. Jclouds provides a portability layer that's not standardized yet, but it is the same for various providers. You can use the same code with different cloud providers without knowing all the intricate details of each vendor.
Does jclouds focus primarily on provisioning?
Yeah, jclouds has a few functional areas. We focus on two very popular ones. The first is BlobStore for NoSQL style stores with portability. Second is provisioning service, which lets you create control a group of virtual or physical machines that you can deploy your runtime to. So for example, if you were running a JBoss grid, then you could use jclouds to boot up all the software needed to push that out – and maybe even shut down and grow the cluster as demand requires. So you can build a lot of interesting systems on top.
