This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Web Buzz by Ed Tennant. Original Post: Grails Hosting in the Cloud Feed Title: All the Way to the Beginning Feed URL: http://allthewaytothebeginning.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default Feed Description: Beginning Groovy and Grails topics including books, training, developing with NetBeans, Grails plugins, and hosting. Latest Web Buzz Posts Latest Web Buzz Posts by Ed Tennant Latest Posts From All the Way to the Beginning

How simple can hosting become? I’m not interested in a private cloud or putting servers in a public cloud, I want a cloud web site. To me the difference is with a server in the cloud you need to configure and manage the application server, while hosting an application in the cloud allows the provider to manage the application server for you. Ideally I’d like a solution like Heroku with their instant Ruby platform. What are the choices for completely managed Grails hosting today?

Morph Labs

Used by grailspodcast.com – The Groovy & Grails Podcast.

Morph Labs appears to be ready to manage everything except writing your application. With Exist thrown into the mix they may even do that for you too.

Google App Engine

Used by groovytweets ::: groovy in the twitter universe.

Google App Engine is from Google so I assume it will eventually dominate the Earth and any additional planets that tap into our Internet. Long denied Java love this solution grew from Google’s amazing amount of cheap servers and can now will Groovy and Grails.

Cloud Foundry

I don’t have an example site but Marcel’s excellent blog post provides detailed instructions on how to deploy a Grails application. There are a ton of comments wishing you didn’t need to bring your own fulltime Amazon EC2 instance with you as that sets the floor for pricing above most dedicated Virtual Private Server offerings.

Stax

This one came from a comment on Marcel’s blog and it looks promising. They web site claims to support Grails and it can scale down below a full EC2 instance as well as up to multi-server clusters. Being able to begin with less than a 24/7 server instance sounds appealing but may need further investigation.

Something Else

I’m certain that I must have missed something.  There are probably lots of other capable solutions because there seem to be new offerings every week. Of course they need to support Java. I looked at Rackspace and Joyent but they didn’t seem to cover the management and/or Java requirements. If you know of additional services for Grails hosting in the cloud please let me know in the comments. I’d like to develop a comprehensive list.