I am about to develop my masters project using Flex as front end, BlazeDs, Java Web Services and MongoDB in the backend. I am looking to deploy and manage it on a cloud. (The application analyzes financial data from various sources, I will need to query multiple endpoints for news articles and DB for processing)
It is my experiment to usage of cloud rather than deploying on my local for demo and presentation purposes.
I saw heroku (http://www.heroku.com/), but I am not sure if it allows flash.
Please suggest a cloud application platform which allows Flex, BlazeDs, Java Web Services and MongoDB?
Amazon Web Services is a good place to start. You can have a instance ready in like 15-30min from signing up. If you are just experimenting, you ought to try to get the Amazon Linux Image (AMI) up and running. Scour the net on HOWTO set up Tomcat, for your requirements it might be too much to go J2EE, but you might know better.
But a word of advice, it’s better to get your application working on a local machine first. Then drop the programmer hat and put on the deployment hat 100% cause it’s a b!tch configuring deployment environment for Tomcat configurations, Blaze DS, Mongo’s failover servers, load balancers and all kinds of non-programming tasks. You will want to work your development stack close to home so you can diagnose quickly.
Cloud business is great only when you want 1) Not use your home PC and bandwidth as a server 2) You want to have global mirror points to your application so that user’s latency in one area of the world is not slower than another part of the world 3) You want to distribute computing load burden on one application across many instances of the same application.
Clouds are relatively cheap to deploy but if you got an application that hording GB’s of bandwidth and storage, be prepared to fork over $1000’s+ in costs. You can save money by going with an OS with no licensing costs to get a better rate.