Provisioning temp space

CloudCaptain makes it effortless to deploy modern JVM-based applications on VirtualBox and AWS. Most of these applications are based on Spring Boot, Dropwizard, Tomcat, TomEE or the Play Framework and many of them are completely stateless with all state stored in some external service like RDS or S3.

This works great as it perfectly fits the core principles behind CloudCaptain: Immutable Infrastructure, Minimal Images and Blue/Green deployments.

However some applications also need to temporarily store some state locally for a number of reasons including:

• locally caching large objects
• storing intermediate steps of a larger job
• staging file uploads

Introducing easy temp space provisioning

Starting today CloudCaptain can now easily provision any amount of temp space you need. Every instance going forward will have 1 GB of temp space on disk. You can increase this all the way to 16384 GB (16 TB) or disable it completely by setting it to 0. This storage should be considered strictly ephemeral and will be automatically destroyed once the instance it is attached to terminates.

So how does this work in practice?

Say you have an application that requires 100 GB of temp space. You can now enable that by doing:

> boxfuse run myapp-1.0.jar -tmp=100

And that's it. CloudCaptain will fuse an image and launch an instance by provisioning both the root device (where your application code resides) and a new temp volume of 100 GB which will be automatically available for you to use under /tmp. CloudCaptain will also automatically configure the JVM to use the /tmp folder for all temporary files.

You are fully flexible and can enable this either at image creation or at instance launch time.

Also note that on AWS all temp volumes are encrypted by default and auto-destroy when the instance terminates to ensure the privacy of your data.

Conclusion

While CloudCaptain has always worked great with modern stateless JVM applications, today we introduced support for easily provisioning from 0 to 16384 GB (16 TB) of strictly ephemeral instance temp space. This space is automatically ready to use and mounted under /tmp.

This feature is available today for all CloudCaptain users on both VirtualBox and AWS instances at no additional cost. (AWS charges may apply)

Existing users only need to update their CloudCaptain client with

> boxfuse -u

to start using this.

Enjoy!

And if you haven't already, sign up for your CloudCaptain account now (simply log in with your GitHub id, it's free) and start deploying and auto-scaling your JVM applications effortlessly on AWS today.