Doug Hughes on ColdFusion and the Cloud

Interview by Ruslan Sivak, Fusion Authority Reporter

At CFUnited 2009, Ruslan sat down with Doug Hughes of Alagad and interviewed him about his work and thoughts on ColdFusion. This gem — that Alagad has been working with Adobe to beta-test ColdFusion on the cloud — came out in the interview. Now that Doug has made the news public, it seemed fitting to present this video and edited transcript for an inside look at the process of using ColdFusion in the cloud.

Doug:

So the work that Adobe is doing to deploy ColdFusion on the cloud. It was actually Chris Peterson from our company [Alagad] who put together the AMIs, and Adobe has much larger plans in terms of where they're going... Actually, we are currently deployed in the cloud. Every application we have at this point is running on Amazon EC2, with the exception of some of our clients, who have their own systems. And we have had pretty good success with that. We've just scratched the surface. There's a lot we can do with it that we haven't even gotten to yet.

Ruslan: And the cloud space itself is about to blow up.

Doug:

Absolutely. Microsoft's getting in the game. There are major organizations out there that I couldn't even tell you the name of that are in this. I mean it is definitely the direction that things are headed.

You know, going back to this whole thing about the experience that end-users have, and the capabilities of the CFML platform.. who was it? The Swedish website that... the RAILO website [myswitzerland.com] how they were scaling proportionately based on ...as load increases, they had deployed additional servers to handle it. I believe I remember talking to Gert about how they did that. Let's say you were to upload a video to their service. What they do is they'll spawn up a whole new server, send the video to that server. That server's whole purpose is just converting that video and putting it on some sort of central location on an S3 drive and then that machine shuts down. You've only paid for the time that that machine has been online to do that video transformation but without impacting the performance of anything else on the website. Then they serve the whole thing straight from S3 via HTTP and it never even hits the webserver again to provide that. If you're talking about massive applications and gigantic scalability, the cloud is the clearly the way to do it. And I think it's going to be very interesting to see how Adobe, or if Adobe, approaches other cloud computing platforms outside of Amazon, which ... well, maybe they won't.

Ruslan: I understand that you can get your own...

Doug:

That's a good point. Yeah, it doesn't matter where you deploy to. Because we're doing the EC2 work, we're kind of focused on Amazon and their AMIs. I mean you can do whatever cloud computing platform you want and deploy, I think it was up to 10 instances in it under one license. Which, if you stop and think about it, that is a great reduction in the fee of the enterprise server. It's now like $600 per instance rather than theoretically $6000.

Ruslan: Originally, I guess you could have run it on the same box with 2 CPUS, 10 instances and you could have VPS...

Doug:

You could, but then it would have to be one hell of a decent box, if you stop to think about it. We ran (I think) five instances on one server at one point and it was pretty taxing to the server. You have to have enough memory for each one of those instances and really for the applications that were running in those instances. Really what they were doing was shooting high and giving more than what was technically fair.

Ruslan: Especially with Railo coming out and being available on the cloud...

Doug:

There was definitely a lot of pressure on Adobe to do it. They had to do something, but... it will be interesting to see what decisions they make and how it all plays out. It's been kind of interesting from my perspective. Since Adobe acquired Macromedia and ColdFusion with it, there was kind of an incubation period where I think they were focusing a lot more on Flex and AIR and that platform. That's a very robust platform now. And it seems like the focus has come around to ColdFusion because if you look at the work they put into ORM and SharePoint integration and all these seriously major features they put in ColdFusion...

My major criticism of Adobe is that they make every feature 80% of the way. It's that last 20% that just kills you. YOu need to get something to work but to do it you've got to drop everything out of ColdFusion and do it on your own. In this case, they've given you, with ORM, as far as I can tell, everything you can do in Hibernate and they've made it easier. They've got tons and tons and tons of things you can do with SharePoint. In the end, it just gives you that much more power. And I think it's probably a reflection of the greater investment into Adobe from ColdFusion, whether it be just in terms of money or manpower.

It seems to be giving the product some maturity. As an example, if you take a look at, say, the .NET platform or the Java platform, the tools and the capabilities of those platforms are very, very vast. You can do a lot with them. And there are huge frameworks, like Hibernate, like Spring. All of these very, very robust tools. That shows that there's some maturity in those platforms. And I'm beginning to think that we might be getting that level of maturity from ColdFUsion, which I find kind of heartening. And the fact that it talks to anything means that it doesn't really matter — you could be working with Java, you could be working with .NET, you could be working with PHP or Ruby or whatever. And you have all these capabilities to talk to anything, manage data, it's more than just enterprise services, but all those nuts and bolts really tied together, too.

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