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I am looking at options to host my Grails webapp. Being just a new website I don't expect a lot of traffic to begin with but I would like to have the option to be able to expand without jumping through hoops without breaking the bank.

I have been pondering over Cloudfoundry and Amazon ElasticBeanstalk. Can someone point out the pros and cons of these services and also point me to other services that might be out there.

Ankur Chauhan
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You might want to checkout CloudBees which provides:

  • CloudBees Grails Plugin - created by Marco Vermeulen leveraging the newly open sourced cloudbees-client-api
  • This blog post which explains Grails Continuous Deployment

The advantage of CloudBees is that is not only provides you with a runtime environment for your Grails apps but also a Development environment (Git, SVN, Maven repositories, Jenkins as a Services for continuous integration, etc.) that smoothly integrates with the PaaS. Also, CloudBees PaaS offers free apps (actually, you can try all of their features for free), clustering/HA, automatic scalability, and a fancy delta-deployer which makes subsequent uploads of your apps a breeeeeeze.

sacha
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I know eApps is getting ready (as in any day now) to release their cloud service publicly. I used the service during their beta period, and it was actually really nice.

I had a VM loaded with ubuntu server, and then I loaded on mySQL, Apache2 and Tomcat, and then installed my app and off it went.

Really it's like a VPS, but cloud based where you can go and control your resources on the fly, so if you are looking for a SaaS solution, this would not be the route to go.

I've tried Amazons Elastic BeanStalk, but found that learning all of their terminology and figuring out the best strategy and services to use was just to complicated for my small app.

aasukisuki
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There is also stax.net. It costs a little more than cloudfoundry (it adds some fees on the aws cost) but the advantage is that you can host more sites on a single vpn. (you can make slices of down to 256 mb). And the hosting for development and testing is free.

Recently it has been acquired and integrated into cloudbees. I don't know how CloudBees is, all I described about stax.net is on previous experience.

I don't have much experience but in the long run my bet will go with Amazon ElasticBeanstalk. Amazon is moving so fast ahead!

cripox
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  • We finally selected elastic beanstalk because of the increased flexibility. But this also seems to be good given the complete SDLC can be managed in the cloud – Ankur Chauhan Mar 05 '11 at 15:20