Recently MuleSoft surprised me with productizing an Amazon EC2 or GoGrid image - they bundled together an instance of Tomcat, and MySQL, called it CloudCat, and are charging a premium for it. I guess the idea is to blend into Amazon per-usage pricing by allowing developers to "quickly" test their apps bypassing the step of creating an EC2 or GoGrid image.

After staring at it for a while, I am still struggling to see the value of it. I mean I see some value in it, but not enough to subscribe to it. According to MuleSoft, it should be enough for a development shop to take a Tomcat instance with default configuration, and deploy a WAR file into it which will auto-magically work with default configuration of MySql that they have.

I cannot speak for others, but I myself have never been able to use a TomCat installation that I didn't have to tweak, nor had I ever used MySql installation that I didn't have to tune. So eventually, I would still have to take their CloudCat image, change it, perhaps add my own scripts and libraries there, and then create my own image out of it anyway. Firstly, I am not even sure if CloudCat license or user agreement would permit me to do this at all, but even if it did, there is no longer a reason for paying premium for it. The only advantage proposed by MuleSoft, which is giving me a ready-to-use image, is vanished.

We at GridGain are taking a very different approach. The GridGain image that we ship is a very thin "boot" loader, and its main responsibility is to dynamically download an actual GridGain release from some cloud storage location (S3 on Amazon), and start it up. User can optionally override absolutely any configuration or any library in GridGain release by passing overriding parameters to the image. So, to summarize, you get the following:

• No need to create any custom images.
• GridGain image is just a "boot" loader that loads GridGain from another location.
• The final "image" is dynamic since it dynamically downloads and starts up GridGain release and configuration from another location.

This is it - extremely flexible and very simple! We have been calling this approach CloudBoot, but how about CloudDog just to continue on the trend started by MuleSoft? (j/k)