Operating JMS in the cloud - ACTION-153

I took an action item to investigate whether or not it was possible to
operate JMS in "the cloud".  The point of this investigation was to
verify that vendors wishing to supply implementations of SOAP/JMS could
host their application "in the cloud" - for example on Amazon EC2.

That way, we could sidestep concerns about hosting a testing environment
within any particular organization, and the implications of punching
through a firewall.

And the answer is...

For the two JMS implementations that I looked at, it seems entirely
feasible to host "JMS" servers and their clients in the cloud.  Notably,
Apache ActiveMQ, and TIBCO's EMS product both allow for the use of IP
addresses to locate the JMS server.

This means that JMS Clients for these implementations will need to be
reconfigured on startup with the updated IP address of the JMS server.
That IP address will change with each start/stop of the "virtual
machine" hosting the server in the cloud.

Note that we probably don't want to put a JMS server up "in the cloud"
and leave it running:
 * it will cost money to do so
 * it potentially could be a hacker target, since we'd be unlikely to
authorize incoming IP addresses - since they'd change with every startup
of a VM.

So I think we can host JMS in the cloud, although the logistics of
getting it up and running might involve phone calls/emails to request -
"start the server now", and to communicate "today's" IP address.

-Eric.

Received on Monday, 29 March 2010 23:44:26 UTC