Java EE Cloud application deployment with Amazon EC2

This tutorial is going to cover the basics of using the Resin Java application server with Amazon Web Services for cloud deployment. If you are new to cloud computing and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), follow along and you will soon be deploying Java web applications in the cloud. You wil create an EC2 instance. You will download and install Resin on Ubuntu on a local machine. You will install Resin on an Amazon Linux AMI instance (EC2 instance). You will use Roo to create a simple application and deploy it.

We use Eclipse to create a simple war file and then we deploy it to Amazon EC2. Future tutorials will use other common Java tools as well as show you how to configure and manage a complete Resin server cluster. Think of this as the first tutorial in a series of tutorials.

For this tutorial you will need Resin 4.0.27 or later. Check back periodically because as we are going to expand the tutorial and improve Resin's support of cloud deployments. The Resin engineering team plans on improving cloud support continuously.

Many of the steps in this tutorial would be similar even if you were using Eucalyptus, CloudStack with CloudBridge, RightScale myCloud or even OpenNebula this guide should help you along as they all support the Amazon EC2 REST APIs. Also any cloud computing environment (private or public, on premises or hosted) will have similar characteristics. Thus even if you are using a private cloud using OpenStack like Project Olympus, the principles will be the same. In fact even using remote servers deployed in a datacenter or virtualized servers with Xen Server, Xen Cloud or VMWare vSphere the steps will be very similar.

For this tutorial we expect you are familiar with starting, and stopping Amazon WS instances. If you are not, go through this tutorial from Amazon WS. You will need an Amazon WS account. Amazon WS allows you to have free tier so you can learn Amazon WS (EC2, S3, Elastic Load Balancer, Block Storage, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service, Simple Notification Service).

This tutorial will show how to install Resin and manage on CentOS/Amazon Linux/Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as Ubuntu/Debian. The local development box for this tutorial is Ubuntu/Debian. The instance running in the cloud is Amazon Linux which is a fork of CentOS which is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Thus even if you are not interested in Amazon cloud deployment, you might find this tutorial a good intro to Resin install and app deployment.

Fire up an Amazon Instance

Fire up an Amazon Instance using Amazon Linux (basically CentOS 5.4). Then install Resin as follows using RPM:

$ sudo rpm --import http://caucho.com/download/rpm/RPM-GPG-KEY-caucho
$ sudo yum install http://caucho.com/download/rpm/4.0.24/x86_64/resin-pro-4.0.26-1.x86_64.rpm

If the above steps confuses you, make sure you go through the Amazon EC2 tutorial and then return to this step (tutorial from Amazon WS).

If everything went well, then Resin should be installed. You can test this as follows:

$ resinctl status

Output

Resin/4.0.27 status for watchdog at 127.0.0.1:6600

watchdog:
  watchdog-pid: 1455

server 'app-0' : ACTIVE
  password: missing
  watchdog-user: root
  user: resin(resin)
  root: /var/www
  conf: /etc/resin/resin.xml
  pid: 1570
  uptime: 0 days 00h04

Install Resin on a Local Box (Ubuntu)

Install Resin locally so you test locally and deploy. Feel free to install it on any supported OS.

Add Caucho's Debian repository to your system's repositories to use automated update tools like Synaptic and apt-get. To do this, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://caucho.com/download/debian unstable multiverse

Then install Resin as follows:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install resin-pro

It is a good idea to make sure the version you install on Amazon AMI matches the version you install locally.

You can see that Resin is installed as follows:

$ ls /etc/resin
app-default.xml      health.xml  resin.properties
cluster-default.xml  resin-inf   resin.xml


$ ls /var/www
doc  licenses  log  resin-data  watchdog-data  webapps

$ ls /etc/init.d/resin
/etc/init.d/resin

$ ls -l /usr/local/share/resin
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 2012-03-22 18:42 /usr/local/share/resin -> resin-pro-4.0.27

Also at this point, Resin should be running as well, and you can verify this with resinctl status:

$ resinctl status

Output

Resin/4.0.27 status for watchdog at 127.0.0.1:6600

watchdog:
  watchdog-pid: 18597

server 'app-0' : ACTIVE
  password: missing
  watchdog-user: root
  user: www-data(www-data)
  root: /var/www
  conf: /etc/resin/resin.xml
  pid: 18692
  uptime: 0 days 00h13

Create a simple war file to test deployment with

If you already have a war file that you want to deploy, then you can skip this section.

Use Eclipse for Java EE Indigo or higher.

Using Eclipse Indigo

1. Go to File menu -> New Project -> Dynamic Web Project
2. In New Dynamic Web Project Dialog-> New Runtime...
3. In New Runtime Dialog -> Download Additional Server Adapters -> Select Resin (Java EE Web Profile) 4.0.24
4. (Click Next and Ok until it installs Resin runtime)
5. (Eclipse needs to restart)
6. File -> New Project -> Dynamic Web Project
7. In New Dynamic Web Project Dialog-> New Runtime...->Select Resin->Check create local server checkbox
8. Step 2 of New Runtime...->Click Download and Install
9. Fill out project name etc. (hello).
10. (Click Next and Ok until you are done)

After the project is setup, do the following:

File->New->Servlet (Name the new Servlet example.HelloWorld)

Modify the class so it looks like this:

package example;

import java.io.IOException;
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.annotation.WebServlet;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;

@WebServlet("/hello")
public class HelloWorld extends HttpServlet {

	protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
		response.getWriter().print("HELLO WORLD!");
	}


}

Use Eclipse to Export the project as a war file.

1. Right click project
2. Select Export->War menu

Save file as hello.war.

Deploy locally and test

Deploy the example Servlet app with Resin.

$ resinctl deploy hello.war

Deployed production/webapp/default/blog from hello.war to hmux://127.0.0.1:6800

You can see if the app was actually deployed:

$ resinctl deploy-list

production/webapp/default/blog

Now you should be able to load the Hello world example.

http://localhost:8080/hello/hello

Create an Elastic IP and assign it to your Amazon WS Linux instance

Background on Elastic IP Amazon EC2 instances are assigned two IP addresses at launch: a private (RFC 1918) address and a public address. The public address is mapped to the private IP address through Network Address Translation (NAT). Every time you start or restart an instance, it gets new public and private addresses.

Amazon EC2 provides a service called Elastic IP addresses. Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses. Elastic IP addresses are associated with your account, not a specific instances. You can associate an Elastic IP address with an instance. It is good to associate your instance with an IP address so you can direct your calls to that instance when deploying an application.

If you are not familiar with Elastic IPs, read the Amazon documentation on Elastic IP Elastic IP, just scroll down a bit and you can see how to create an Elastic IP from the Amazon WS Web Console.

Directions

Create an Elastic IP and assign it to the Amazon WS Linux instance using the Amazon web console.

I got this IP address.

23.21.195.83

In order to use it, you must assign it to our instance that has Resin. In the console for managing Elastic IP address is an option under actions to assign the Elastic IP address to our instance.

Warning Remember after you restart the server, you need to reassign it the Amazon Elastic IP. This means go to the console. Find the list of Elastic IPs. Select the one you want. Click the Associate Address button and pick the instance ID of the server that has Resin. Every time an instance restarts it forgets its IP address unless you reassign it.

Create password for your Amazon Cloud instance

$ resinctl generate-password -user admin -password mypassword

Output

admin_user : admin
admin_password : {SSHA}somerealpasswordNv3IzMO0GlqNmzk3J

Create a properties file and put it into user-data of Amazon AMI

Create a file that looks like this:

https         : 8443
admin_user : admin
admin_password : {SSHA}UaNyLiyzU1kepY7OSayrtdVGZf5/XJCE
web_admin_enable : true
remote_cli_enable : true
web_admin_external : true

To put the above in the user-data of that instance, you typically need to stop the instance from the Amazon EC2 console or command line. Then from the Amazon Management Console, select the instance in the instances list, then select the action "View/Change User Data" and add the contents above. In a later lesson, we show you how to do this from the command line.

Reminder Associate with Elastic IP after restarting instance Remember after you restart the server, you need to reassign it the Amazon Elastic IP. This means go to the console. Find the list of Elastic IPs. Select the one you want. Click the Associate Address button and pick the instance ID of the server that has Resin.

After you restart the Amazon instance, look at its security group and make sure the following inbound ports are open up.

It should have the following

Port (Scheme) Source

22 (SSH)	0.0.0.0/0
80 (HTTP)	0.0.0.0/0
443 (HTTPS)	0.0.0.0/0
8080 (HTTP*)	0.0.0.0/0
8443 (HTTPS*)	0.0.0.0/0

Create ec2.xml file

With Resin 4.0.27 and above you can configure additional config files like mycustom.xml and drop them under /etc/resin/resin-inf/mycustom.xml, and these XML files get picked up by Resin and become part of the Resin configuration. This was added to make configuration simpler for cloud deployments.

Background

The actual directive that looks for these additional xml files is in /etc/resin/cluster-default.xml which gets included by /etc/resin/resin.xml.

/etc/resin/cluster-default.xml

...
 <resin:import fileset="${__DIR__}/resin-inf/**/*.xml"/>
 ...

The above is why you can define xml files into /etc/resin/resin-inf/ and they get picked up by Resin.

Directions

Create the file that is listed below called ec2.xml and put it into /etc/resin/app-inf/ec2.xml on the Amazon instance.

<resin xmlns="http://caucho.com/ns/resin"
      xmlns:resin="urn:java:com.caucho.resin">

  <resin:properties path="http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data"
                    optional="true" recover="true"/>

</resin>

The IP address (http://169.254.169.254) is a meta address that Xen, and Amazon EC2 use to configure per instance data about the instance you are running. The above is configured to read properties out of this user data location.

Log into Amazon AMI instance and add the above to /etc/resin/app-inf/ec2.xml.

$ ssh -i resin2.pem ec2-user@23.21.195.83 
$ sudo mkdir /etc/resin/resin-inf
$ sudo nano /etc/resin/resin-inf/ec2.xml

XML files that you add to /etc/resin/app-inf/ get added to the resin app cluster configuration configuration. This allows you add just the additional config you need without changing the rest on the resin configuration.

Remember: the Amazon security group that this instance needs has to open up the following ports 8080, and 8443, 80, and 443.

To test out our changes, from your local development machine execute this command:

$ resinctl deploy --address 23.21.195.83 --port 8080 --user
admin --password mypassword  hellow.war

You can see if the deploy worked by do the following:

$ resinctl deploy-list --address 23.21.195.83 --port 8080 --user admin --password roofoo

production/webapp/default/blog

Now it works in the cloud:

http://23.21.195.83:8080/hello/hello

Now you have created an single box and deployed to it. In the next example, we will show you how to deploy another box, cluster it with this instance that you just setup, and then put an Amazon Load Balancer in front of it.

Java EE Cloud Deployment, Setting up Amazon Load Balancer