RyanKaskel.com

I recently deployed Google adsense to my website with the slim hope that someday this blog will become immensely popular and possibly earn a quick buck. A man can dream, can’t he? The power of adsense is that it detects the content of your pages and serves up ads that are related — and it works. In fact it worked so well that I ended up clicking ads on my own site. The first add that was impressed on the new banner slot at the top of all pages was for a company named Cohesive FT. They were (and still are I assume) promoting something called their Elastic Server Platform with a huge text that read “Django 1.0.”

Elastic Server Platform banner ad

Because Django is my web application framework of choice and “cloud computing” and “virtual servers” are the en vogue technologies, I went ahead an clicked. I was surprised to have stumbled across a great tool. I didn’t exactly know I was doing at first but it soon became obvious — I was creating a minimalistic server packaged with my choice of a popular application(s), in this case Django.

Django options

Usually I use VMware’s database to test out virtual servers but this was cool and different. The application was letting me configure the virtual server exactly how I wanted it with no bloat. In the Django “track” you can select either Python 2.4 or 2.5, Django 1.0, 1.0 beta, or 1.0 alpha (this didn’t really make any sense — why would you want to use a beta or alpha, a more useful option would be the Django trunk), Apache bundled with mod_python 3.3.1 for Django deployment as well as a few of the more popular open source databases along with their corresponding Python package. The options are MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLlite — nothing too surprising.

It’s the next step that is the most interesting. The Elastic Server On-Demand allows you to choose what virtual machine you want to deploy your server to. The options so far are VMware (my choice), Parallels, Xen, and the newly added VirtualIron. You can also select to deploy the virtual server to the “cloud” (i.e. Amazon EC2 web services) which sounds pretty cool but since I don’t use the Amazon’s web services, I didn’t try it out.

Virtual machine deployment options

One of the things I hate about pre-packaged virtual servers/desktops is that there isn’t any choice for how much memory you want the software to use and you can’t choose/change the virtual disk size (at least with VMware player or I just don’t know how to do it).

System options

You also have your choice of operating system (currently limited to DaiSY Linux and Ubuntu 8.04/8.10), network type (bridged, local, or NAT) and finally how you want to compress the image. You can then name your server and provide a description. You also have the option to share you custom configuration with the Elastic Server community. I haven’t tried this feature but after perusing the site I could see many diverse custom virtual servers available for download.

The next step is to build the server image which takes a few minutes but is overall pretty quick.

Building in progress

Once the application completes the build, it is ready to download and deploy. Once you load the virtual server into your virtual machine software, you  can configure it (well some of it) from a web application automatically deployed and running. The application is okay but I prefer to use the command line and emacs to do my configuration. After creating my own user account (they give you some lame default — a nice option to add to the build process would be the ability to choose your own administration username) and doing some other fiddling, I had a Django server running in about 15 minutes after the download. Pretty cool stuff and free as well (you can upgrade to a premium account if you so choose).

I haven’t yet explored the Amazon EC2 deployment options and I’m sure there are a lot more options around the site I haven’t gotten around to browsing but I did notice that along with Django, there is a Ruby on Rails deployment options as well as the new Google App Engine framework. The Elastic Server On-Demand network is very up to date with the latest and greatest web frameworks.

On the whole, I was very impressed and I suggest the service to anyone that likes toying around with software or needs to create a test server deployment for your website. Check it out!