Technology, The Web, and Oxford Commas.

by Chris Mallinson


A Cloudy Suggestion for Adobe

by Chris

There is a lot of buzz about “The Cloud” and I think it’s warranted. Every time someone gets a CFML engine running in a cloud environment, like the recent cloud successes involving Railo and Open BlueDragon, the community gets a little more interested. I’m sure there’s a way to get ColdFusion server, in certain deployments, to run in the cloud, but licensing issues would arise.

At the Adobe MAX conference, last November, I was asked by several Adobe people about cloud computing, and if I, as a CF developer, was interested. I got the impression that they were either thinking about the possibility of allowing CF to run in the cloud, or worried that developers would jump to another language that would.

I have to admit that at the time, I didn’t think it would be something I needed to explore yet, but it’s getting there. I think that the cloud computing model will fit perfectly for the medium sized websites. Sites that occasionally spike, and get a large, but not CNN/Digg sized, amount of traffic.

There are already entire companies based on providing cloud solutions for Ruby, Python and PHP, among others.  CFML is behind on this, and although there are a bunch of good people working on rectifying that problem, we are going to need more.  I think Adobe could kill a couple of birds with one stone by offering a ColdFusion hosting environment to users, in a cloud-like configuration, for a regular hosting fee.  This would solve the licensing issue for those that want to deploy their CF apps in a cloud environment, and allow some companies that are wary of the costs to get in on the ground level, and see what ColdFusion has to offer.

6 Responses to A Cloudy Suggestion for Adobe

James says: June 10, 2009 at 9:48 am

While I understand the licensing issues, I don’t understand why it would be hard to get a ColdFusion install to run in the cloud?

Again, licensing issues aside, you just have access to the servers and can set them up however you see fit. Unless you are talking about a managed solution where they handle the scaling and increased load automatically.

Any thoughts?

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Chris says: June 10, 2009 at 10:26 am

CF should definitely be able to run in the cloud, since it can be deployed as a WAR file, so if Adobe resolved the licensing issue, that obstacle would be removed. There are some very insightful thoughts on this in John Beynon’s blog post Licensing ColdFusion Virtually.

My thought about Adobe setting up a cloud computing option specifically for ColdFusion are just a shot in the dark. I noticed them asking developers a lot of questions about cloud computing, and if it was simply to resolve licensing issues, I’m not sure why they would take the risk of waiting for CF9 to announce their intentions. It would not be hard to open up a new license option for existing CF8 customers.

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Indy Nagpal says: June 14, 2009 at 2:24 am

I think deploying Railo on the cloud is a fantastic option. Most applications I’ve migrated from Adobe CF to Railo CF have just worked. Plus, the architecture of Railo is really really nice — for example, the ability to have solid sandboxes by separating the server and web admins.

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Sean Corfield says: June 22, 2009 at 7:42 pm

Glad to see Mike mention Stax.net! Stax offers two ColdFusion 8 templates and a Railo template for its dynamically scalable application platform. One of the ColdFusion templates is a cut down “core” install (about 100MB – since CF8 is very large to deploy as a WAR), the other is the full WAR install. The Railo template is a full install (since the WAR is only about 30MB).

Adobe adjusted their licensing model with CF8 to accommodate virtualization based on a known number of physical CPUs. In the cloud model, the problem is you don’t know how many physical CPUs you might be using. Adobe have definitely been giving indications that they want to address this which would be great.

It’s probably also worth noting that the Open BlueDragon project team has managed to create a (slightly restricted) version of OpenBD that runs on the Google App Engine. Quite a feat, given the somewhat draconian limitations of GAE!

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Chris says: June 22, 2009 at 9:12 pm

Yes, thanks all for mentioning Stax.net. I actually did sign up for the beta, and plan on giving it a try with a new app I’m working on. I’m really glad to see CFML making its way into these environments.

I’m sure Adobe will address this issue with CF9 (although now that I’ve said that they probably won’t), but I’m still sad to see them not relaxing some restrictions on CF8. I recently had a call with an Adobe employee conducting an audit of licenses. I don’t mind this too much, since the company I work for purchases hundreds of CF licenses annually, and we use it extensively. However, one of the CF instances I run is on a VM in a huge cluster on our intranet, which gets allocated processor cycles as required. It’s a tiny app that could run easily on one processor, but I mentioned its environment during the audit, and it opened up a huge can of worms. Physical processors is no longer a good way to license software. I have CF running on a six year old quad xeon machine with 4 physical processors, and on a brand new 8 core Mac Pro with 2 physical processors. You can guess which one is faster, but the slow one needs two licenses.

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