blog : Tomcat Expert's Top 10 of 2010

posted by joannad on December 30, 2010 08:53 PM | 29 comments

2010 has been an exciting year for the Tomcat Expert community site. Created by the Apache Tomcat Experts at SpringSource, Tomcat Expert was launched in March to improve the adoption, performance and value of Apache Tomcat for enterprise users. After almost ten months of operation, we’ve been able to provide you with content from Tomcat Expert Contributors weighing in on top Apache Tomcat news and topics, including several relating to June's release of Tomcat 7.0.0 Beta, the first Tomcat 7 release.  As the year winds down, we've put together a list of the most popular blog posts of the year. Additionally, we're asking you to tell us what topics you'd like to see covered more in 2011 with a content request form below. 

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blog : 3 Simple Steps to Deploying Artifacts in the Cloud

posted by jbrisbin on July 26, 2010 08:12 AM | 32 comments

You've spent a lot of time setting up a private cloud of servers. Everything's virtualized and you have it organized by function. Your messaging VMs run on these hosts and your web servers run on those hosts. You've tested it extensively and you're happy with how everything talks to each other. The worst is over, right? Wrong. Now you have to move past the theoretical and actually use this thing in production. It's time to start deploying the applications you're building into this cloud of virtualized resources. It's time to develop some scheme to keep your applications updated when changes are made. Keep in mind, whatever mistakes you inject at this point will be multiplied by the number of machines that deploys to.

Scared yet?

Don't be! It's really not that hard. In this article, I'll introduce you to some concepts I used in developing the fairly simple system of messages and scripts that deploy artifacts into our private cloud. This won't be a technical HOWTO so much as it will be a casual dinner conversation about the pitfalls and rewards. Above all, I want to get across that having a bunch of virtual machines that do the same thing doesn't have to keep you up at night.

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