Welcome new members!

[Warner Onstine]

Wow, doubled overnight! Thanks for joining and I hope this group will
be helpful for all of us, I've already gotten some great advice on
here that I'll be implementing (or am in the middle of implementing).

My vision for this group is not *just* about Grails development but
also about Startup development. My hope is that we can share our
experiences, knowledge and resources with each other to "get over that
next hump" (whatever that may be).

On that note, please keep in mind that all new members are moderated
for their first post (I don't want spammers on here) and I'm currently
the only manager, if others wouldn't mind stepping up to be moderators
(whom have already posted) it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks and welcome again!

-warner

[Hans Westerbeek]

Hi all,

Considering the popularity of this list I suppose Grails really
delivers on the productivity promise:) I've been working on mine for a
couple of weeks now and I still haven't spent any time on nastly
boiler plate, only worked on the stuff i want to work on. And that's
just great :)

Anyway, thought I might throw a question into the group here. I am
building a public-facing webapp and I'm looking for hosting space. I
have considered slicehost and contegix. Am I missing one?

I thought about appengine but I'm not too keen on having to deal with
its datastore at this point. Should I reconsider?

cheers,
Hans

[Warner Onstine]

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 12:31 PM, Hans Westerbeek
<hanswes...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Considering the popularity of this list I suppose Grails really
> delivers on the productivity promise:) I've been working on mine for a
> couple of weeks now and I still haven't spent any time on nastly
> boiler plate, only worked on the stuff i want to work on. And that's
> just great :)
>
> Anyway, thought I might throw a question into the group here. I am
> building a public-facing webapp and I'm looking for hosting space. I
> have considered slicehost and contegix. Am I missing one?

Amazon EC2 is one I've been playing around with, I guess it depends on
your budget.

>
> I thought about appengine but I'm not too keen on having to deal with
> its datastore at this point. Should I reconsider?

Haven't tried to play with this, although you could have your db on a
separate machine if necessary.

-warner

>
> cheers,
> Hans
>
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>

[Ted Naleid]

> Anyway, thought I might throw a question into the group here. I am
> building a public-facing webapp and I'm looking for hosting space. I
> have considered slicehost and contegix. Am I missing one?

Amazon EC2 is one I've been playing around with, I guess it depends on
your budget.

EC2 now has micro instances for free (for new customers for 12 months): http://aws.amazon.com/free/

My startup has been running grails on EC2 for the last year and I'm really happy with it.  We've scaled quite a bit past free at this point though and are now using Rightscale to autoscale our EC2 instances based on our load.

 

>
> I thought about appengine but I'm not too keen on having to deal with
> its datastore at this point. Should I reconsider?

Haven't tried to play with this, although you could have your db on a
separate machine if necessary.

If you're not keen on dealing with the datastore, I wouldn't go to app engine.  That's really the main draw for going to app engine, to solve problems that fit in well with that type of NoSQL soution.  

I've got a number of friends working on one of the biggest appengine deployments at Best Buy here in Minneapolis.  From what I've heard, if you go with appengine, you want to be as close to the native appengine stuff as possible.  If I went that way, I wouldn't use grails, but would instead look at either Gaelyk (http://gaelyk.appspot.com/) for groovy or else go with the vanilla python stuff.  Both Django and Grails can work with appengine, but once you're past a certain level of complexity the mismatch between the Grails/GORM or Django apis and how they interact with how app engine really works will get in your way.

-Ted

 

[Hans Westerbeek]

Thanks Ted, I'll look into EC2 some more. Also your appengine/gaelyk
adice is priceless.

Cheers,
Hans

[Michael Johnson]

You may also want to look at Rackspace. They don't have a free micro
instance like EC2, but they are very reasonably priced and can scale
with your needs. I have an account for my personal development as
well as a hosted solution for my companies site. A quick look at
their site (www.rackspace.com) should let you know if they'll fit your
needs. They have fantastic customer support and they're
internationally friendly (although I don't know how many countries
they actually host in). Anyway, just thought I'd throw in my two
cents...

MJ

On Dec 12, 7:02 am, Hans Westerbeek <hanswesterb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Ted, I'll look into EC2 some more. Also your appengine/gaelyk
> adice is priceless.
>
> Cheers,
> Hans
>

[Edvinas Bartkus]

Could you share some more information what are the costs of running Grails on Amazon EC2?
How many instances do you run, and how many pageviews does it generate?

I want to keep my budget as low as possible, until first clients (one client - many users) are found.

But at the same time I want to make sure that in the future I will not have to change the whole structure of application.

Edvinas

[Marc Palmer]

Its the classic problem :(

I'm paying about £300/mo to contegix at the moment for two virtual boxes, both managed. I balked at the price for management ($175/mo per VM) initially but I decided to use it because that translates to not very much of my consulting time - certainly less than I would have to spend maintaining the boxes myself. You mail them and stuff is done, quickly. I've not done a single app deploy on these boxes.

However they don't have elastic scaling at the moment.

If NoticeLocal takes off, we'll be looking at hybrid contegix + EC2 setup I think, with data backend with a web-facing REST layer on top at contegix, and web app front ends doing the page rendering and client facing stuff at EC2. That's the idea anyway. I have precious little experience in this area.

One thing I know is that monitoring and debugging production problems is really really hard. We had the app consume 200% cpu on the dual core box the other day. Heap was fine, permgen was 99% used at 92MB, but the JVM was running with 256M max perm size.

We didn't find the root cause, and that scares me. I don't like "reboot it so it works".

Marc

[Warner Onstine]

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 12:43 PM, Marc Palmer <li...@anyware.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On 13 Dec 2010, at 18:50, Edvinas Bartkus wrote:
>
>> Could you share some more information what are the costs of running Grails on Amazon EC2?
>> How many instances do you run, and how many pageviews does it generate?
>>
>> I want to keep my budget as low as possible, until first clients (one client - many users) are found.
>> But at the same time I want to make sure that in the future I will not have to change the whole structure of application.
>>
>
> Its the classic problem :(
>
> I'm paying about £300/mo to contegix at the moment for two virtual boxes, both managed. I balked at the price for management ($175/mo per VM) initially but I decided to use it because that translates to not very much of my consulting time - certainly less than I would have to spend maintaining the boxes myself. You mail them and stuff is done, quickly. I've not done a single app deploy on these boxes.
>
> However they don't have elastic scaling at the moment.
>
> If NoticeLocal takes off, we'll be looking at hybrid contegix + EC2 setup I think, with data backend with a web-facing REST layer on top at contegix, and web app front ends doing the page rendering and client facing stuff at EC2. That's the idea anyway. I have precious little experience in this area.

I was thinking something similar for my layout, except that
CouchOne/CloudAnt would be hosting my db for me and possibly EC2
front-end. Still playing.

>
> One thing I know is that monitoring and debugging production problems is really really hard. We had the app consume 200% cpu on the dual core box the other day. Heap was fine, permgen was 99% used at 92MB, but the JVM was running with 256M max perm size.
>
> We didn't find the root cause, and that scares me. I don't like "reboot it so it works".

I agree, that is worrisome. :-/

-warner

>
> Marc