Traditionally, computer hardware was a scarce, expensive resource. Running performance tests often meant scavenging for machines around the office. Today, however, things are different. With Amazon’s EC2, a cluster of servers is now just a web service call away.
In this presentation you will learn about design and implementation of Cloud Tools, which are a Groovy-based framework for deploying and testing Java EE applications on EC2. This framework provides a simple (internal) DSL for configuring a cluster (database + web container + apache), deploying a web application, and running performance tests using JMeter. You will learn about capabilities of EC2 and how to use it for development and deployment. We describe how we use Amazon S3 to work around EC2's lack of a persistent file system and avoid time-consuming uploads of WAR files. You will also learn how Groovy helped and hindered with the development of the Cloud Tools.