JBoss Rails & JBoss in the Cloud

Bob McWhirter
JBoss Middleware, a division of Red Hat, Inc.

1
JBoss-Rails

2
Agenda for JBoss-Rails
‣ Background on Ruby on Rails
‣ Rationale for JBoss-Rails
‣ HOWTO JBoss-Rails
‣ JBoss-Rails Microcontainer Deployer
‣ Web deployment
‣ Meta-data
‣ Parsing
‣ Structure

3
Ruby on Rails
Background

‣ Built upon the Ruby language.

‣ Full Model-View-Controller support:
‣ Easy embedded-Ruby templates (erb).
‣ ActiveRecord for ORM.

‣ REST support baked right in.

‣ Fast code/test cycle.

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Ruby on Rails
Downsides

‣ Traditional C-Ruby (aka “MRI”) not the most

performant.
‣ Until recently, not thread-safe.
‣ Each request-handling processor was a new
interpreter. Run packs of mongrels.

‣ Supports purely a web-view of the world.

‣ Primarily a UNIX environment.

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JBoss-Rails
Why?

‣ Rails is ultimately just yet-another

application model & framework, if you
ignore the bit about Ruby.
‣ Still maps to functionality we’re used to in
the Java EE world.
‣ JRuby provides a conformant & performant
Java-hosted Ruby interpreter.

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JBoss-Rails
Really, why?

‣ I love writing applications using Ruby and

Rails.
‣ But it’s sometimes a true pain:
‣ Lots of moving parts (httpd, mongrel, cron, etc).
‣ No baked-in support for non-web processing, such
as batch jobs, asynchronous message-handling, or
timers.

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JBoss-Rails
Why JBoss is The Answer

‣ JBoss technologies provide enterprise-

grade infrastructure:
‣ Web Container
‣ Messaging
‣ Caching
‣ Clustering

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JBoss-Rails
Why JBoss is The Answer

‣ JBoss technologies provides an end-to-end

deployment stack:
‣ AS5 For the processing and handling.
‣ mod_cluster for front-end proxying and clustering.

‣ JBoss is happy to support Windows

developers.

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 JBoss-Rails
It’s just a deployer

‣ To enable AS5 to deploy Ruby-on-Rails

applications, you simply copy a new
deployer into your server’s deployers/
directory. It’s about 12 MB.

cp -R jboss-rails.deployer/ $JBOSS_HOME/server/all/deployers/

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JBoss-Rails Deployer
Microcontainer

‣ A little bit later we’ll dive into how the

deployer is put together

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JBoss-Rails
Preparing your RoR app
‣ Your Rails application needs to have Rails
“vendorized”.
‣ Rails itself should be in your source-tree under
vendor/rails/**

‣ Your Rails application needs to have Gems

it uses “vendorized”
‣ Ensure each gem is also installed underneath
vendor/plugins/**

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JBoss-Rails
Preparing your RoR app

Really, that’s just a “best practice”

regardless of your Ruby environment.

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 JBoss-Rails
Preparing your RoR app

‣ Optionally, for ease, install the jboss-rails-

plugin into your app using git.
cd vendor/plugins
git clone git@github.com:bobmcwhirter/jboss-rails-plugin.git

‣ The plugin provides Rake and Capistrano

tasks to ease usage of JBoss-Rails.

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JBoss-Rails Plugin
Setup JDBC

‣ JBoss-Rails uses JDBC instead of Ruby DB

drivers.
‣ The plugin can easily check your
database.yml configuration and set up
your project for JDBC:

rake jboss:rails:jdbc:install

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JBoss-Rails
Preparing your RoR app

‣ Once you’ve vendorized Rails, your Gems,

and installed the JDBC drivers using the
plugin...

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JBoss-Rails
Deploying your app

‣ The simplest way to deploy is using the

rake tasks provided by the jboss-rails-plugin

rake jboss:rails:deploy

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JBoss-Rails
Deploying your app
‣ It’ll seek out $JBOSS_HOME/server/default,
and drop a JBoss-Rails deployment
descriptor into the deploy/ directory.
‣ AS5 doesn’t even have to be running.
‣ The RAILS_ROOT of your application is the
live deployment:
‣ Editing of views & controllers will be reflected
immediately.

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JBoss-Rails
Deployment descriptor
‣ The deployment descriptor is just a YAML
file acting as a symlink with meta-data to
replace web.xml:
deploy/myapp-rails.yml

---
application:
RAILS_ENV: development
RAILS_ROOT: /Users/bob/oddthesis
web:
context: /

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JBoss-Rails
Deployment descriptor
‣ The context allows you to host multiple
apps, even alongside traditional WARs.
‣ An optional host is allowed for virtual-host
binding within AS5.
deploy/myapp-rails.yml

web:
host: api.mycorp.com
context: /api-v2

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Your Rails App on JBoss
‣ Surf to your server’s normal web-listening
port, at the host and context specified...

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Your other apps on JBoss
‣ And your other contexts work, too:

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JBoss-Rails Internals
Microcontainer Pieces

‣ We’ll walk backwards through the deployer:

‣ It ends with a running an accessible application.
‣ In the middle, we tickle Tomcat.
‣ It starts with noticing there’s a Rails app needing
deployment.

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Deploying a Web App
AS5 knows how to do that

‣ The deployer knows it’s running within AS5,

which means there’s a Servlet container
(Tomcat) available to it.
‣ No reason to start another webserver

‣ Luckily, using a ServletFilter from

JRuby-Rack, we can hook a Rails app in
as a Java web application.

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Deploying a Web App
AS5 knows how to do that

‣ Configure a regular web-app for Tomcat, but

instead of reading a web.xml, just set up the
configuration programatically. A web.xml for
a Rails app is just boiler-plate anyhow.
‣ Mix in RAILS_ROOT for the ServletFilter.

‣ Mix in the context and host configuration.

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How do we know RAILS_ROOT?
RailsApplicationMetaData & RackWebMetaData

‣ The RAILS_ROOT for the deploying

application is handed to us through a
RailsMetaData object during deployment.
‣ The RailsApplicationMetaData is
associated with a RackWebMetaData.
‣ It is the RWMD’s mere existence is what
drives this portion of the deployment.

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MetaData comes from where?
Anywhere, really

‣ These MetaData objects can be deployed

from anywhere. You can create and deploy
them programmatically, even. They aren’t
very magic.
‣ They’re just a Java object model embodying
configuration information.

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One source of metadata
Parsing deployers!

‣ While MetaData can be created a multitude

of ways, ParsingDeployers can create
them from files.
‣ Files such as...
‣ web.xml

‣ persistence.xml
‣ myapp-rails.yml

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Rails parsing deployers
Files into MetaData

‣ The myapp-rails.yml is read.

‣ A RailsApplicationMetaData object is
created and associated with the deployment.
‣ Includes RAILS_ROOT
‣ Includes RAILS_ENV

‣ A RackWebMetaData object is created and also

associated with the deployment.
‣ Includes host
‣ Includes context

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Symlink or Archive deployment
If you don’t use myapp-rails.yml

‣ You can also drop a symlink or archive of

your app into deploy/ and provide
configuration in your app’s config/
directory.
‣ config/jboss-rails-env.yml

‣ config/jboss-web.yml

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Meta-data files
Knowing where to look

Rails apps have

a familiar and
recognizable
structure.

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Structure Deployers
Telling Microcontainer where to look

‣ Humans can recognize the structure of a

Rails application.
‣ Structure deployers recognize the “shape”
as a Rails app, too.
‣ And knows config/ holds a lot of important
configuration type of files.
‣ Tells Microcontainer to “look in there”.

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Deployer Review
Start-to-End

‣ Rails structure deployer recognizes RoR

app.
‣ Parsing deployers poke around config/
and create *MetaData objects.
‣ Other deployers consume *MetaData
objects and set up Tomcat, Quartz, etc.

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Other Ruby/Rails Deployers
Quartz Scheduler

‣ Cron-like recurring scheduled tasks are

useful.
‣ Another deployer looks for
jboss-scheduler.yml.
‣ Creates ScheduleMetaData.
‣ Which is consumed and deployed as Ruby-
backed tasks into AS5’s Quartz scheduler.

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Other Ruby/Rails Deployers
Future

‣ Deployment of Ruby-backed Message-

Driven Beans (MDBs).
‣ Deployment of Ruby-defined Drools rules.

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JBoss-Rails Questions
Please hold your questions until the end

‣ Questions about JBoss-Rails will be

answered at the end of this presentation...

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JBoss-Cloud

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Agenda for JBoss-Cloud
‣ What’s “the cloud?”
‣ JBoss-Cloud project
‣ Thincrust Appliances
‣ Challenges working in the cloud
‣ Multicast
‣ DHCP
‣ Other configuration
‣ Launch JBoss in the cloud
‣ Future Work

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What does “The Cloud” mean?
Virtualization

‣ “The Cloud” means OS-level hardware

virtualization.
‣ Amazon EC2
‣ VMWare
‣ KVM
‣ Xen

39
What does “The Cloud” mean?
Not grids

‣ Google’s AppEngine
‣ Sun’s GridEngine

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Why the cloud?
Red Hat synergy

‣ Virtualization makes clustering convenient.

‣ Virtualization makes scaling easier.
‣ Red Hat has excellent tooling for creating
cloud server images.
‣ Will lead to push-button deployment from
development to production clusters.

41
JBoss-Cloud
Project

‣ The JBoss-Cloud project is tooling to

produce cloud-ready server images.
‣ Based on the Red Hat Thincrust project which...
‣ Uses Kickstart files to stitch together...
‣ Bundles of RPMs
‣ Can target many virtualization hosts:
‣ VMWare
‣ EC2
‣ KVM

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JBoss-Cloud
Thincrust Appliances

‣ JBoss-Cloud, using Thincrust tooling,

creates consistent specialized server
images, known as “appliances”.
‣ JGroups Appliance (for GossipRouter)
‣ JBoss-AS5 Appliance (including JBoss-Rails)
‣ Apache/mod_cluster Appliance (web front-end)
‣ PostGIS Appliance (enterprise-grade database)

43
JBoss-Cloud
Fedora Remix

‣ Based upon Fedora 10 Yum repositories.

‣ Includes “just enough” packages.
‣ Plus appliance-specific packages

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Cloud Considerations
Some things work differently

‣ Few cloud environments have multicast

enabled, affecting cluster formation.
‣ Most cloud environments boot images using
DHCP, affecting node locating.
‣ Cluster servers are homogenous, and
ideally require no manual configuration.

45
Cloud Workarounds
Not problems, just challenges
‣ Instead of relying upon multicast for cluster
discovery and formation, fire up a
GossipRouter.
‣ Use Puppet to handle reconfiguration, such
as adjusting the bind IP based upon the
DHCP-assigned address.
‣ Inject any custom configuration using cloud
out-of-band boot-data facilities.

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Gossip in the Cloud
Overcoming lack of multicast

‣ When multicast can’t be used, JGroups

provides a GossipRouter as a rendezvous.
‣ Each cluster node is told about the
GossipRouter at boot.
‣ Nodes discover each other through the
central router.
‣ A JGroups appliance can cohabitate with
other appliances.

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Dynamic Reconfiguration
Using Puppet

‣ The core Thincrust tooling provides

facilities to run Puppet scripts at boot.
‣ These scripts can introspect the state of the
server, and adjust configurations AS5
launches.
‣ They can also use cloud boot-data facilities
for additional configuration:
‣ Web-proxy and GossipRouter addresses

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Dynamic Reconfiguration
Puppet in action

‣ For instance, script determines the

machine’s current IP address and sets the
following in /etc/jboss-as5.conf:
JBOSS_IP=192.168.237.174
‣ It also queries the boot meta-data and sets
in the same file:
JBOSS_GOSSIP_HOST=192.168.237.173
JBOSS_PROXY_LIST=192.168.237.173:80

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/etc/init.d/jboss-as5
Configuration and booting

‣ The /etc/init.d/jboss-as5 script

reads /etc/jboss-as5.conf, and sets the
appropriate Java properties.
‣ JBoss AS5 fires up fully-configured, ready
to form a cluster with other nodes.

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Clustering becomes easy
Boot and go

‣ To build a cluster then...

‣ boot one JGroups+WebProxy appliance.
‣ boot one-or-more JBoss AS5 appliances with the
address of the first appliance as boot meta-data.

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Web Proxies
JBoss mod_cluster

‣ Apache httpd and mod_proxy_ajp are good

stuff.
‣ But keeping worker lists correctly configured in
an every-changing, DHCP-booted environment
is not fun.
‣ JBoss mod_cluster uses the JGroups cluster
view to maintain the worker list.
‣ mod_cluster works with stock Fedora apache-
httpd

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JBoss mod_cluster
Reversing the relationship

‣ Instead of having to explicitly tell the httpd

process about each worker, simply tell the
worker nodes about the httpd server.

‣ That’s JBOSS_PROXY_LIST in the

configuration.

‣ Nodes ping httpd, on the regularly-listening

port, and tell it about themselves.

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JBoss mod_cluster
If you have multicast

‣ If you have multicast, you can avoid even

dealing with JBOSS_PROXY_LIST.

‣ mod_cluster can advertise itself over

multicast to the nodes for completely
automatic discovery and configuration.

‣ JBoss-Cloud assumes no multicast, though.

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JBoss VM2
Slight Tangent
‣ Before we actually walk through using
JBoss-Cloud images, we need to pick a
virtualization environment.
‣ I’m using VMWare Fusion on an Apple
MacBook Pro.
‣ Instead of using the GUI, I use JBoss VM2,
a layer to allow VMWare to work somewhat
like Amazon EC2.

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JBoss VM2
Images and Instances

‣ Like EC2, you register image bundles with

VM2.
$ vm2 register front-end-appliance.tgz
registering front-end-appliance as vmi-ac731d2449

‣ You can then spin up multiple instances

from the same image.
$ vm2 run-instances vmi-ac731d2449

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Front-End Appliance
Launch your first machine

‣ The front-end-appliance contains

‣ JGroups GossipRouter

‣ Apache httpd with JBoss mod_cluster

‣ Launch 1 instance:
$ vm2 run-instances vmi-ac731d2449

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Write a cluster.conf

‣ Discover the front-end-appliance instance

IP address:
$ vm2 describe-instances
Instance ID VMI State IP Address
------------------------------------------------------
i-672cc0e853 vmi-ac731d2449 RUNNING 192.168.237.173

‣ Create a cluster.conf boot data file

JBOSS_PROXY_LIST=192.168.237.173:80
JBOSS_GOSSIP_HOST=192.168.237.173

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 Boot up AS5 nodes
Build your cluster
‣ Launch an AS5 appliance with the
cluster.conf as boot meta-data:
$ vm2 run-instances vmi-42c8ee3ea4 -f cluster.conf

‣ Confirm everything is running:

$ vm2 describe-instances

Instance ID VMI Name State IP Address

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i-672cc0e853 vmi-ac731d2449 front-end-appliance RUNNING 192.168.237.173
i-90030665a9 vmi-42c8ee3ea4 jboss-as5-appliance RUNNING 192.168.237.174
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Confirm!
Fire up that browser
‣ Surf to the front-end box. Notice the IP
address reported by the JMX console
compared to the location bar:

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Do it again
Launch more AS5 nodes

‣ Keep launching AS5 appliances with the

same cluster.conf.

‣ They’ll join the cluster and link up with the

web proxy front-ends.

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Deploy your App
Get code on the servers

‣ Currently, it’s up to you to rsync/scp/uucp

your application into the cluster nodes
deploy/ directories, where it should hot-
deploy.

‣ Soon JON/JOPR will support AS5, and help

with multi-node cluster deployment of apps.

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Future Work
Actual EC2 Support

‣ Adjustment of the Puppet recipes to handle

the way EC2 provides boot meta-data.

‣ Convert all current appliance images to

EC2’s bundle format.

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Future Work
JBoss Cloud-Control project

‣ Cloud-Control will ease management of

cluster.conf files and control the booting
and management of server instances.
‣ Abstract cluster topology definitions will mix
with applications and cloud credentials:
$ cloud-control new-cluster \
--topology small-cluster.yml \
--target ec2 \
--deploy myapp.war

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Resources
JBoss-Rails & JBoss-Cloud

65
OddThesis.org
Where it all goes down

OddThesis.org is the
primary project site
for both JBoss-Rails
and JBoss-Cloud.

66
GitHub.com
Where the source lives

We use git for

revision control.

The repositories
are hosted at
GitHub.com

‣ http://github.com/bobmcwhirter/jboss-rails
‣ http://github.com/bobmcwhirter/jboss-rails-plugin
‣ http://github.com/bobmcwhirter/jboss-cloud
‣ http://github.com/bobmcwhirter/vm2

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irc.freenode.net
Where the developers chat

Chat with the

developers on
IRC.

‣ irc://irc.freenode.net/jboss-rails
‣ irc://irc.freenode.net/jboss-cloud

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Projects Mentioned
Project I use, but didn’t write

‣ JRuby-Rack (Rails-Servlet integration)

‣ http://github.com/nicksieger/jruby-rack/tree/master
‣ Red Hat Thincrust (appliance creation)
‣ http://thincrust.net/
‣ Puppet (dynamic reconfiguration)
‣ http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet/
‣ JBoss Microcontainer (JBoss AS5 kernel)
‣ http://jboss.org/jbossmc
‣ JBoss mod_cluster (Web proxying)
‣ http://jboss.org/mod_cluster

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Thanks
Pause, thank crowd, exit.

Thanks for paying attention.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/

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