Virgo in the Cloud: a CloudFoundry buildpack

The recent Virgo community survey showed quite a bit of interest in running Virgo in the cloud. With CloudFoundry's forthcoming "buildpack" support, this was relatively easy to achieve.

A Virgo buildpack is available on github - see the README for detailed information. It currently supports two types of application: web applications or "overlays". A web application may be a standard WAR file or an OSGi Web Application Bundle. An overlay is a pair of directories -- pickup for the application(s) to be deployed and repository/usr for any additional dependencies not already provided by Virgo -- which are placed in an instance of Virgo Server for Apache Tomcat.

The support for buildpacks should ship later this month - see the CloudFoundry roadmap.

OSGi Running in the Cloud: Virgo in CloudFoundry

I'm just been tryout out Hristo Iliev's support for Virgo in CloudFoundry, described on his blog. The VM took a few hours to download and a few minutes to unzip, but then starting CloudFoundry and deploying an application to a Virgo instance worked first time.

CloudFoundry takes a little while to get started:

But then it's trivial to deploy an application to a Virgo instance:



after which the application, in this case the Virgo web admin console, runs as expected at the application URL http://virgo.vcap.me:

and jconsole shows where the Virgo instance has been created:

The cloud nature of this setup becomes more apparent when another application is deployed. Since I'm lazy, I deployed the same application under a different name:

The application is then available at http://virgo2.vcap.me and jconsole shows there are now two Virgo instances running:

I'm looking forward to Hristo's pull requests become merged into the CloudFoundry base and maybe eventually Virgo showing up in some clouds near you.